10 WATSON v. REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ALITO, J., dissenting minds of legislators during the Civil War is hard to take seriously. States valued their uniformed citizens’ right to vote and wanted to ensure that soldiers had a voice in selecting the officials who would direct the deadly conflict in which they were engaged.6 See, e.g., 1864 Ky. Acts p. 122 (conferring on soldiers a statutory right to vote “as fully as if such [soldiers] were present” at their usual polling place on election day); 1864 N. H. Laws p. 3061 (similar). And States surely knew that it would take time for ballots to make their way from the front lines back to soldiers’ home precincts. States likewise knew that the alternative approach of requiring soldiers to simulate polling places in the field on election day would be burdensome amid ongoing military engagements. Most importantly, States knew how to extend deadlines or grant exemptions to accommodate soldiers whose active service in the Civil War made it difficult for them to fulfill their civic and legal duties. See, e.g., 1862 Ky. Acts p. 67 (giving soldiers up to an extra year to file an answer in pending civil actions); 1861 Wis. Laws ch. 309, p. 319 (suspending civil proceedings in cases where the defendant is serving in the military); 1862 Conn. Pub. Acts p. 74 (exempting soldiers from various state taxes for five years following honorable discharge); 1865 Minn. Laws pp. 58–59 (exempting soldiers from service of civil process and tolling statutes of limitations for claims against soldiers). Given these examples, it strains credulity to suggest that the thought of extending ballot-receipt deadlines simply never occurred to any State during the Civil War. In any event, the majority does not explain what sort of evidence respondents would need to offer in order to “precisely tie” the States’ practices “to the text of the electionday statutes.” Ante, at 12 (internal quotation marks —————— 6 It is irrelevant to the question presented that some States did not adopt absentee voting in the Civil War at all. Contra, ante, at 12, n. 5. What is relevant is that, where States did endeavor to protect soldiers’ ability to vote, States required that ballots be received by election day.