The Supreme Court ruled in two major cases this week, and Eric Eggers says both send the same signal: the courts won’t decide the future of election integrity. Congress and the states will.
Eggers, Vice President of Research at the Government Accountability Institute and author of Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, weighed in the day after the justices ruled 5-4 that states may count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, provided they’re postmarked in time.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion in Watson v. RNC, upholding Mississippi’s five-day grace period. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, warning the decision threatens confidence in election integrity.
A day later, the Court upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-3 ruling, striking down the administration’s executive order. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion grounding the guarantee in the 14th Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred separately, agreeing the order failed but resting his reasoning on a 1940 federal statute — and pointing to Congress as the body that can act.
Eggers seized on that framing.
The Court declined to legislate from the bench, he argued, and instead read the Constitution as written. He predicted Democrats will campaign in 2028 on packing the Court, and urged them to remember that the justices refused to rewrite the law to fit either party’s preference.
But he didn’t sugarcoat the cost.
Longer counting windows, Eggers said, drain public confidence — especially when results appear to swing as late batches of ballots land. He pointed to states that open a 40-day window between sending ballots out and collecting them, to legal ballot harvesting in places like California, and to a Postal Service he doesn’t trust to move ballots reliably.
He cut past the usual fraud fight directly. Much of what worries him has already been legalized, Eggers argued, so the real threat isn’t unproven fraud — it’s the appearance of it.
When voters stop believing their elections are secure, he said, that collapse of trust damages the country regardless of what any audit turns up.
So Eggers looks past legislation for the fix. Election-integrity groups he’s worked with are studying the agencies instead — the rules that govern the federal role in registering voters, and whether existing law can be modified to require ID when casting a ballot in federal elections. His bottom line: the right may not need the SAVE Act to get there.
He credited the administration with one especially sharp move — leveraging the power of the purse. The Department of Homeland Security is conditioning election funding on states verifying citizenship on their voter rolls through a DHS database and validating the number of ballots scanned against votes counted.
Eggers closed on the wider backdrop, citing Alito’s point that 8 billion people sit one plane ride from the United States, where a child born on American soil gains citizenship and can eventually open a path for the parents through chain migration. The election laws on the books predate legal paid ballot harvesting, he noted — a fundamentally different world. The law always lags the technology, Eggers argued, and in both rulings, the Court made clear it won’t be the one to close the gap.
With the midterms roughly four to five months out, Eggers delivered a narrow-window message: the courts aren’t riding to the rescue, so the fixes will come from the agencies and the creative use of laws already on the books.
Watch the clip above.
