Cite as: 609 U. S. ____ (2026) 7 ALITO, J., dissenting from home. Some States allowed soldiers to mail their ballots back home, either directly to local officials or to proxies who would cast them at the polls. E.g., 1863 W. Va. Acts pp. 119–120; 1864 N. Y. Laws pp. 549–551. Others sent commissioners to soldiers’ camps to distribute absentee ballots, collect them, and then deliver them to officials in each soldier’s hometown. E.g., 1864 Conn. Pub. Acts pp. 52–53. A third group of States tasked military officers with administering polling places in the field, complete with ballot boxes and voter-registration lists. On this model, officers collected ballots, checked names off lists, counted votes, and, for some States, even took oaths as election officials. E.g., 1866 Nev. Stats. p. 215; 1864 Kan. Sess. Laws pp. 102–103. Critically, regardless of the method a State used, each State continued to mandate that poll workers, whether on the field or “back home,” received soldiers’ ballots by election day.4 E.g., 1863 W. Va. Acts p. 120 (requiring that election officials count a mailed-in vote if “received . . . on or before the day of election”); 1866 Nev. Stats. p. 215 (mandating that field-voting polls be open from 8 a.m. to sunset “on the day of election”). The practice of collecting all ballots by election day persisted into the 20th century. To be sure, there were some departures from this norm in the years after Congress —————— 4 The majority questions whether it is defensible to treat ballots in field-voting regimes as “received” as soon as military officers collected them on election day, especially since some States did not formally deputize officers as election officials. Ante, at 11, n. 4. Regardless of whether such officers were “deputized,” however, these officers (unlike a postal worker) often performed the same kinds of functions that poll workers performed back at local polling places. Compare 1866 Nev. Stats. pp. 214, 216–217, with id., at 215. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that ballots were “received” on election day in field-voting systems. Indeed, the majority describes field voting in this way just one footnote earlier. See ante, at 11, n. 3 (noting that “ballot casting and ballot receipt” in field-voting systems occurred “simultaneous[ly]” on election day).