KUOW72%
Looming Supreme Court decision could change Washington voting forever 20%
By Kim Malcolm38% Shane Mehling0%
6/18/2026, 5:32:26 PM
Keywords: Voting, Supreme Court, Mail In Ballots, Grace Periods, Election Security, Washington State
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Indoctrination, Self-Serving Bias, and In-Group Bias, with Confirmation Bias as the most egregious example at 17.6% saturation with 155 hits. Analysis detected 1,773 faulty-reasoning hits from 882 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35% and a BS Rank of 20% (16,324 of 20,408 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.00% of the article peer group.
As early as Thursday, the Supreme Court could release their decision around so-called grace periods for mail-in ballots.
Washington, along with 13 other states, allows mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later to be counted.
An additional 15 states offer grace periods under certain circumstances.
If the Supreme Court rules grace periods are unconstitutional, it could have a significant impact on voting in Washington — and ballots for the primary election are going out in less than a month.
KUOW's Kim Malcolm spoke with Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs about preparations for the decision and other voting challenges the state faces.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Kim Malcolm: So the general election in 2024 in Washington state had about 120,000 late ballots that were postmarked on Election Day, and that makes up roughly 3% of voters in the state.
So what plans are being put in place if the Supreme Court rules against these grace periods?
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs: We anticipated that this might happen, and also we had USPS rulemaking that happened around this time last year in which the postmark was changed from the moment that your carrier got it to being ran through the central processing facility.
So we decided when we do our public information campaign where we let the public know about elections, stressing more on, "Hey, you need to get your ballot in early."
I would say to people out there, if you're a week out, then you just need to take it to the drop box.
If you're more than a week out, you could probably mail it and be O.K.
But I wouldn't take the risk if you're a week out.
I'd just take it to a drop box.
On a related matter, when it comes to the U.S.
Postal Service, President Trump has ordered the USPS to restrict mail-in ballots for states that do not hand over their voter rolls to the federal government, and Washington is part of a lawsuit to block that order.
What would the fallout look like if the Postal Service is allowed to go ahead and implement that?
So, it'd be pretty devastating.
Now, the rulemaking that the U.S.
Postal Service is doing based upon that executive order that you're talking about says that the states need to give them a list.
And so our state will give them the list of people we were going to mail ballots to anyway.
But the problem with that is, well, how are they going to secure it?
Also, we update our list almost by a minute-by-minute basis, so are they going to do the same thing?
And how are they going to process this?
Are they going to collect them all at the central processing facility and then scan them all in?
The other thing that people don't realize is that, based on the USPS' rulemaking, we have to change the outgoing ballot, so that's the ballot that you send to the county to be counted — we have to have a barcode on it now, which we didn't have to have before.
And so that's going to take time.
That's going to take money.
Look, we're going to sue on this.
We're already doing that on the executive order, but we're also preparing to sue the U.S.
Postal Service if they enact a rule that restricts or disrupts the way we do elections here in the state of Washington.
No matter what the decision is — how broad or how narrow it comes down from the Supreme Court on mail-in ballots after Election Day — accusations of voter fraud continue to grow here in Washington, sometimes amplified by the state Republican Party.
All evidence so far is showing that our elections are above board.
What steps are you taking to convince people that they can trust our process?
What we are trying to do is talk about the process of elections.
This is why you have a part of the population who thinks that the elections are fraudulent because, quite frankly, myself and other elections officials have done a very poor job of talking about the elections process.
For example, in our state, we check every signature.
In our state, there are audits before and after the election.
Our databases talk to each other.
They talk to other states.
We're part of ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, which means that we know when people vote twice in the same election, when somebody moves to another state and registers there.
We know when people pass away.
We get all that information, and we have not told people that.
And I'll tell you, Kim, before I was secretary of state, I didn't even know that, and that should not be secret or a mystery, and so we are changing that by letting people know what's going on.
And for the Republicans, not every Republican believes that.
I've talked to a lot of Republican legislators, and they believe our elections are good, but unfortunately, there is a segment that does not believe it, and we just got to get the word to them that our elections are secure by talking about the process.
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