Delayed-in-the-mail extensions for absentee ballots have now been ordered by courts in all three of the crucial Great Lakes battlegrounds, increasing the odds for a more comprehensive but also a more prolonged presidential election.
The later deadlines that judges have ordered in the past week in Pennsylvania, Michigan and now Wisconsin are far from locked in place, however, because Republican efforts to reverse them are likely in all three states — with their collective 46 electoral votes central to President Trump's reelection prospects.
Federal Judge William Conley, for starters, has put in limbo for one week his own order on Tuesday, that Wisconsin ballots postmarked by Election Day be counted as valid if received by local clerks by Nov. 9, a six-day extension. He said he was putting a hold on that ruling to avoid confusion if his decision is overturned on appeal, and to keep the pressure on Wisconsinites to vote early.
A state appeals judge on Friday granted a two-week extension in Michigan for the arrival of ballots postmarked by the day before Election Day; the previous day, the state Supreme Court ordered a three-day grace period for mailed ballots in Pennsylvania.
All three decisions came in lawsuits filed by Democrats and voting rights groups, which have filed dozens of such claims across the country this year in hopes the courts will ease access to the ballot box and thereby boost turnout to the benefit of their candidates.
The Trump campaign said Tuesday it would press in the federal courts to restore the usual deadline in Pennsylvania — potentially setting up the first election cases to get before the Supreme Court since the death last week of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Republican National Committee and the state GOP organizations in Wisconsin and Michigan, which argued for the status quo in those states, are expected to press their cases in the appeals courts.
Like 30 other states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania normally invalidate ballots that arrive after the polls close. That could disenfranchise tens of thousands this year. Record numbers of voters in all three states, and almost everywhere across the country, are expected to test the Postal Service's capacity by casting their first-ever remote ballots in the next six weeks so they can avoid potential coronavirus exposure at a polling place.
"It is particularly unreasonable to expect undecided voters to exercise their voting franchise by absentee ballot well before the end of the presidential campaign, especially when Wisconsin's statutory deadline is giving them a false sense of confidence in timely receipt," the judge in that case wrote.
If his and the other court orders stand, they will almost guarantee a wait of a week or more after Election Day for the outcome of close races up and down the ballot — including, perhaps, the national presidential contest.
Significantly complicating a speedier count are laws in all three states that prevent election officials from beginning to process the ocean of mail ballots they receive — verifying the signatures on the envelopes, removing the ballots from their security sleeves and stacking them in front of the tabulating equipment — until the morning of Nov. 3.
Trump carried the three states by a combined 78,000 votes last time, much less than 1 percent of the votes cast, but for now former Vice President Joe Biden has narrow polling leads in all three.
The president has signaled several times that election night is when he and the country should rightfully expect to know the nationwide winner — a position at odds with the realities of fairly and completely tabulating the contest if it stays close.
The federal court ruling in Wisconsin, tackling a series of suits and countersuits by both parties and their allies, addressed a welter of efforts to make voting easier in a state that has had one of the rockiest records of election administration during the coronavirus pandemic. (Just last week another disaster was averted when a court permitted more than 1 million vote-by-mail packets to be distributed on time across the state.)
Conley gave voters until Oct. 21 to register to vote by mail or online, a one-week extension. For those who do not receive requested mail ballots on time, he ordered the state to provide replacements online or by email. And he said poll workers may live in any county in the state, not just in the one where they're working — easing the burden on clerks to find poll workers during a public health emergency.
But the judge denied many of the things Democrats were after — including expanded early in-person voting, state-paid postage on mailed ballots and easements of voter ID requirements for in-person voting and witness signatures on mailed ballots.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.