8 WATSON v. REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ALITO, J., dissenting enacted the final election-day statute. During the World Wars, for instance, Congress and at least nine States allowed absentee ballots to arrive after election day in certain situations. See, e.g., 1918 Md. Laws p. 130; 58 Stat. 146 (noting that “any extension of time for the receipt of absentee ballots permitted by State laws shall apply” to federal “war ballot[s]” in World War II). Yet that practice returned to the margins within a few decades. By 1977, a report from the Department of Defense listed only two States as still allowing ballots to arrive after election day. See Overseas Absentee Voting: Hearing on S. 703 before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, 95th Cong., 1st Sess., 33–34 (1977). These short-lived outlier rules thus shed little light on the original meaning of “election” in the electionday statutes. Likewise, although post-election-day deadlines have become more widespread in the last five decades,5 these developments postdate the last election-day statute by over 50 years and the first statute by over a century. These late-intime practices therefore count for little when discerning the timing restrictions that Congress imposed when it enacted those statutes. See Pung v. Isabella County, 609 U. S. ___, ___ (2026) (slip op., at 6). In sum, from this Nation’s founding until the last few decades of the 20th century—a period that spans the enactment of all three election-day statutes—having an “election” on a particular day meant completing ballot collection on that day. —————— 5 See National Conference of State Legislatures, Table 11: Receipt and Postmark Deadlines for Absentee/Mail Ballots (May 18, 2026), https:// www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-11-receipt-and-postmarkdeadlines-for-absentee-mail-ballots (archived at https://perma.cc/6NB3GPGY).