This week the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that hinges on the meaning of Election Day — and it’s got Democrats sweating.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, challenges a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots received long after Election Day to be counted.

It’s one of 14 states, including populous ones like California and New York, that allows a post-Election Day “grace period” (five business days in Mississippi but longer elsewhere) for ballots to be returned.

That law is being challenged by the RNC.

Taking a states’ rights stance, Mississippi’s defenders argue that deciding when ballots must arrive is a state’s decision.

The U.S. Constitution reserves to state legislatures the authority to prescribe “the times, places, and manner of holding federal elections.”

True — but the Constitution empowers Congress to set the date.

In 1824, Congress chose the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as Election Day, and it’s been the same ever since.

But in recent years the meaning of Election Day has been eroded — its finality and certainty upended by state laws allowing absentee ballots to be counted days later.

At stake is a national treasure of civic virtue, long understood as the one day on which the whole electorate’s votes get counted, and everyone knows the results.

The justices’ decision will have national impact and could potentially affect November’s midterms.

New York’s law allows a ballot postmarked by Election Day to be counted as many as seven days later — and worse yet, it deems a ballot lacking a postmark to “be presumed to have been timely mailed or delivered.”

That’s crazy: It invites cheating.

And many, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, suspect that as ballots straggle in, fraudulent efforts to change the outcome could be afoot.

In California in 2024, “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day,” Johnson observed last month. “And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost.”

Public confidence in the honesty of our elections matters, and states should avoid any procedure that undermines it.

For at least one of the justices weighing the Mississippi case, that will be a major concern.

In 2020, when the court was asked to intervene in a conflict between Pennsylvania’s highest court and its state legislature over a similar question, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he favored limiting ballot-counting to Election Day.

Doing so, he wrote, would “avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of the election.”