GOP Lawmaker Prevails in Supreme Court Ballot Law Challenge (1)

The US Supreme Court allowed a Republican congressman to challenge an Illinois ballot-counting law in a ruling that could have implications for ballot-related lawsuits in future elections.

The 7-2 decision issued Wednesday overturned a lower court ruling that found Rep. Mike Bost had no legal authority to sue since it said he suffered no clear harm from a state law allowing the counting of mail-in ballots so long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and received within two weeks.

The opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, said Bost as a candidate had “standing to challenge the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election.”

Basing whether candidate lawsuits can proceed on whether the rules hurt their electoral prospects, Roberts said, would “convert Article III judges into political prognosticators and ‘invite findings on matters as to which neither judges nor anyone else can have any confidence.’”

The opinion was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. Fellow conservative Amy Coney Barrett filed a concurring opinion which was joined by Elena Kagan of the liberal bloc.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored a dissent that was joined by fellow liberal Sonia Sotomayor. They argued the decision would open the “floodgates” for candidates to bring election-related challenges.

“Congressman Bost has failed to allege that the election-related law he seeks to challenge has caused him to suffer any injury,” Jackson said. “A majority of the Court nevertheless concludes that Bost has standing to sue based solely on his status as a candidate for office.”

Jackson added that “this dubious departure from settled law disregards both the equal treatment of litigants and judicial restraint.”

Barrett’s concurrence also criticized the majority’s reasoning that would require a candidate to “only allege that he is in fact a candidate” to challenge election rules. But Barrett concluded the Illinois law extended the election in a way that represented a “traditional pocketbook injury” for Bost that permitted his lawsuit to proceed.

Mail-In Ballots

Bost has represented his Southern Illinois district since 2015, and won a roughly 75% of the vote in the 2024 and 2022 general elections.

But he alleged in a 2022 lawsuit that the Illinois ballot law hurt his electoral chances and negatively impacted his finances by extending the campaign.

The high court’s decision remands the case to a lower court to consider the merits of Bost’s argument that the ballot law impermissibly extends Election Day. While the justices didn’t weigh in on that broader legal issue, they plan to do so in another case this term.

The court in November agreed to review a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that invalidated a Mississippi law letting mailed ballots be counted as many as five business days after Election Day.

The law was one of many approved during the pandemic that helped expand voting by mail. The Republican Party challenged the measure as incompatible with federal law.

Roberts said that Bost’s standing to sue stemmed from whether he had a “personal stake.” That yields an “obvious answer,” Roberts wrote, as a candidate has “a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election.”

He also wrote a more stringent standard would channel many disputes to shortly before or after elections.

“Such late-breaking, court-ordered rule changes can ‘result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,’ and thus undermine the '[c]onfidence in the integrity of our electoral processes,’” he said.

‘Status-Based Standing’

Jackson in her dissent argued the legal test adopted for Bost by the majority created a “harm-free status-based standing rule” unique from the one that the court’s applied in contexts such as lawsuits over law enforcement abuse.

She predicted that the ruling would ignite “exactly the type of troubling election-related litigation the court purportedly wants to avoid” by relaxing the standard to bring a viable claim. Roberts said he disagreed with those concerns.

“Indeed, the dissent itself suggests that courts already ‘often decide ballot-design cases,’” he said.

The case is Bost. v. Illinois State Board of Elections, U.S., No. 24-568, 1/14/26.