Cite as: 609 U. S. ____ (2026) 9 ALITO, J., dissenting 2 The majority brushes aside this impressive historical record because respondents have not offered direct evidence that state actors believed that federal law required these often-burdensome procedures and timelines. Ante, at 12– 13. For all we know, the majority reasons, the States might have insisted on receiving ballots by election day for their own independent reasons. Ibid. This argument withers on examination, especially as applied to Civil War practices. The States were acutely aware of the federal election-day statutes, and they abandoned practices that they had previously used and presumably preferred in order to comply with them. As the majority notes, before 1845, States had “total control over the timing” of elections for the House of Representatives and substantial leeway to select the date on which voters chose Presidential electors. Ante, at 2. States took advantage of this freedom by holding elections on a variety of dates. Ibid. After 1845, however, States abandoned the practices they previously preferred and held elections on the date Congress specified. Ibid. The majority’s argument therefore boils down to this: States complied with what they understood the federal election-day statutes to require; they did not believe that those laws required that ballots be received by election day; but they nevertheless eschewed the freedom they had asserted before 1845 and voluntarily imposed extraordinary burdens on soldiers and election officials during the Civil War to ensure that ballots were received by the federally imposed election day. And they did all this, the majority speculates, because “extending the deadline” for the receipt of ballots “might not have even occurred to them.” Ante, at 13. To say that this is not the most likely explanation of States’ thought processes would be “a delicately put understatement.” Ante, at 12. The notion that extending ballotreceipt deadlines for soldiers might never have crossed the