(Daily Signal)—Although the Supreme Court issued a stinging defeat to President Donald Trump and Republicans in an election integrity case, justices have more such cases in the pipeline.
One solidly red state, Mississippi, and two battleground states, Arizona and Pennsylvania, were the focal point of election litigation on Monday. The high court ruled 5-4 to uphold a Mississippi law that allows for counting ballots arriving up to five days after Election Day, so long as the ballots are postmarked by Election Day.
The Republican National Committee was the plaintiff in the case, while the Trump Justice Department stated an interest in the case, backing the RNC’s side against the Mississippi law.
“In the RNC v Watson case, the Supreme Court lost a critical opportunity to interpret the meaning of Election Day and now the fight goes to the Congress and state legislatures,” former U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chairman Don Palmer, now a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal.
“Instead, the court has prolonged the delay and confusion Americans witness with late-arriving ballots. Unfortunately, the practice will continue in a minority of states and have a negative impact nationwide on the confidence in our elections. All states should implement legislation enacting Election Day as the deadline for the return of mail ballots.”
The ruling affects more than a dozen states and territories across the country that allow the counting of mail ballots arriving after Election Day.
Illinois and Utah count ballots arriving up to 14 days after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Alaska and Maryland allow ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to 10 days after the election.
California, the District of Columbia, New York, and Oregon count ballots arriving seven days after the election. New Jersey counts ballots arriving up to six days post-election, while West Virginia’s grace period is five days.
California was the subject of criticism after a recent primary election for Los Angeles mayor, where Republican Spencer Pratt appeared to be headed for the runoff on election night before he was edged out by Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman several days later, as more ballots came in.
Nevada and Ohio count ballots arriving up to four days after Election Day, while Kansas, Massachusetts, and Virginia count ballots arriving up to three days after Election Day. Washington state law says that ballots received after the election with postmarks before Election Day are counted, but no deadline is specified for when they must be received, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Before releasing any decisions Monday morning, the high court announced that it would take up the case of Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota.
The question before justices in that case is whether Arizona can require proof of citizenship for voter registration. The high court accepted an appeal from the RNC after lower courts determined portions of Arizona’s 2022 voting law violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as the “motor voter” law.
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division asserted on X that this is a “Very important case!”
“We @CivilRights briefed the importance of this case. Clean voter rolls are essential to election integrity and voter confidence,” Dhillon posted.
The court can “clarify whether states can request proof of citizenship of applicants as part of the eligibility review of voter registration and whether noncitizens erroneously placed on the voter rolls can be immediately removed within 90 days of a federal election,” Palmer said.
“Both of these questions, if answered approvingly, would give states the necessary information to increase the accuracy and integrity of our voter registration process. In the registration process, states often need documentation to verify citizenship status at the point of registration.”
The court will also decide if the state can remove the names of ineligible voters from the rolls within three months of an election, which plaintiffs say violates the “quiet period” of the federal voting registration law.
The Supreme Court is also deciding whether to hear a mail-in ballot case out of Pennsylvania and on Monday asked the Trump administration for its view in the matter.
At issue is a state law that requires envelopes to be sent with the ballots containing a signature and date. Liberal groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sued, alleging the state law led to the discarding of 10,000 ballots in 2022 and of 4,500 ballots in 2024. Plaintiffs claim it violates the right to vote.
Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday, a Republican, appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
In August 2025, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that enforcing ballot dates is not constitutional. The appeals court determined that the potential to discard thousands of votes is not a reasonable trade-off for the “unlikely capacity to detect and deter fraud.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.