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In a separate concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that “the Constitution principally entrusts politically accountable state legislatures, not unelected federal judges, with the responsibility to address the health and safety of the people during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

In earlier litigation concerning Wisconsin’s primary elections in April, the court required that ballots be mailed and postmarked by Election Day. But it did not disturb a similar six-day extension for receipt of the ballots, which had not been challenged in the case then before it.

In dissent on Monday, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the state’s experience in April was telling.

“That extension of Wisconsin’s ballot-receipt deadline ensured that Covid-related delays in the delivery and processing of mail ballots would not disenfranchise citizens fearful of voting in person,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Because of the court’s ruling, state officials counted 80,000 ballots — about 5 percent of the total cast — that were postmarked by Election Day but would have been discarded for arriving a few days later.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. filed a brief concurring opinion explaining why the Wisconsin case differed from the one from Pennsylvania in which the justices deadlocked over whether the state’s Supreme Court could extend the deadline for mailed ballots by three days.

“While the Pennsylvania applications implicated the authority of state courts to apply their own constitutions to election regulations, this case involves federal intrusion on state lawmaking processes,” the chief justice wrote. “Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin.”

A divided three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Chicago had blocked the trial court’s ruling in the Wisconsin case, saying it came too close to the election and amounted to judicial interference in “a task for the elected branches of government.”