6 WATSON v. REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ALITO, J., dissenting Blackwell v. Thompson, 2 Stew. & P. 348, 352 (1832). As that court put it, “the act of voting is not complete” if “the ballot [is] not received.” Ibid.; accord, Goodell v. Judith Basin Cty., 70 Mont. 222, 234, 224 P. 1110, 1113 (1924) (“under the authorities generally, the act of voting is not completed until the ballot is deposited in the ballot box”). Accordingly, if a State accepts ballots after election day, then the State extends “the period of voting,” and therefore the “election,” past that date. Ante, at 7 (internal quotation marks omitted; emphasis deleted). A 19th-century statute that requires an “election” to occur on a particular day thus requires that the State receive all ballots by that date. C 1 Two centuries of historical practice reinforce the proposition that holding an “election” on a particular day means that poll workers had to receive the ballots by that date. From this country’s founding until the late 20th century, election-day ballot collection was the near-uniform practice, with only a few, late-arriving exceptions. Before the Civil War, nearly all voting occurred in person at polling places, so election day was ipso facto the day on which poll workers collected all the ballots.3 P. Steinbicker, Absentee Voting in the United States, 32 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 898 (1938). This practice did not falter when the cannons rang out at Fort Sumter. Even when the Civil War took soldiers hundreds of miles from their usual polling places, election day still meant ballot-collection day. States took different approaches to ensure that their soldiers could vote while away —————— 3 This was true even in the two States that authorized absentee voting for soldiers in the 1810s. For Pennsylvania and New Jersey, military officers would serve as election judges and inspectors in the field and collect ballots from their States’ soldiers on election day. See 1813 Pa. Laws pp. 213–215; 1814 N. J. Laws pp. 16–18.