12 WATSON v. REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE Opinion of the Court were received by election day. See Brief for Respondent Libertarian Party of Mississippi 25. Why would any State be so exacting, plaintiffs ask, if federal law did not demand it? Notably, plaintiffs admit that they cannot “precisely” tie this historical practice to the text of the election-day statutes. Tr. of Oral Arg. 119–120. That is a delicately put understatement. Plaintiffs’ theory is that if the relevant States could have changed the rules, they would have changed the rules. Yet despite a deep dive into the historical record, plaintiffs have found no evidence that any of these States wanted to extend ballot-receipt deadlines, much less that they thought federal law prevented them from doing so.5 Plaintiffs treat this “federal law made me do it” theory as obvious, but state legislatures may have used an electionday deadline for any number of reasons. For instance, they might have shared plaintiffs’ view that an election-day deadline avoids the appearance of fraud from late-arriving ballots. See D. Inbody, The Soldier Vote 41 (2016) (“Concern for voter fraud was always at the forefront of legislative action in connection with the soldier vote”). They might have believed it essential to election integrity to open soldier ballots in the public’s presence, which was possible only if ballots arrived by the day the community gathered —————— 5 The dissent, which treats the inference from history as dispositive, uncritically accepts plaintiffs’ version of events. It asserts—without citation—that States during the Civil War “wanted to ensure that soldiers had a voice in selecting the officials who would direct the deadly conflict in which they were engaged.” Post, at 10. Abraham Lincoln had a less rosy view: In his annual message to Congress, President Lincoln estimated that at least 90,000 soldiers were unable to vote in the 1864 Presidential elections because “the laws of [their] States” did not permit them to “vote away from their homes.” Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., App. 3 (1864). That several States did not allow soldiers to vote absentee at all belies the dissent’s narrative that States did everything in their power to enable the soldier vote.