The Supreme Court opened the floodgates on Wednesday for candidates to file preelection lawsuits challenging election laws, finding political candidates have the standing to start those legal battles.
The high court ruled 7-2 in favor of Rep. Michael Bost (R-IL), deciding that Bost has proper standing, as a federal candidate for office, to sue Illinois over its late-arriving mail ballot law. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
“Under Article III of the Constitution, plaintiffs must have a ‘personal stake’ in a case to have standing to sue,” Roberts wrote. “Congressman Bost has an obvious answer: He is a candidate for office. And a candidate has a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election.”
The majority ruling found that candidates do not need to prove they are in danger of losing an election in order to file a lawsuit, finding that “winning, and doing so as inexpensively and decisively as possible, are not a candidate’s only interests in an election.”
“Rules that undermine the ‘integrity of the electoral process’ also undermine the winner’s political legitimacy,” Robert said. “The counting of unlawful votes—or discarding of lawful ones—erodes public confidence that the election results reflect the people’s will. And when public confidence in the election results falters, public confidence in the elected representative follows.
“To the representative, that loss of legitimacy—or its diminution—is a concrete harm ‘[R]eputational harms,’ as a general matter, are classic Article III injuries,” Roberts added. “But they are particularly concrete for those whose very jobs depend on the support of the people.”
The majority opinion opens the door for lawsuits against states over election laws to occur before the height of the campaign season and the post-election time frame, and it comes after Roberts expressed concern over Illinois, seemingly arguing that candidates’ lawsuits should be filed only during the “most fraught” time of the campaign.
“Candidates have a concrete and particularized interest in the rules that govern the counting of votes in their elections, regardless whether those rules harm their electoral prospects or increase the cost of their campaigns. Their interest extends to the integrity of the election—and the democratic process by which they earn or lose the support of the people they seek to represent,” Roberts said in Wednesday’s ruling.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Elena Kagan, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Barrett’s concurrence agreed that Bost had standing to sue Illinois officials over a law that allows them to count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, but she did not agree with the five-justice majority’s decision to give candidates such broad leeway to file lawsuits over election laws.
“I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates. Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant…And we have repeatedly rejected requests to create special standing rules for particular litigants,” Barrett wrote. “I see no reason to afford candidates favored status.”
Barrett said she instead found that Bost’s reasoning that the law caused his campaign to spend more money was sufficient for a “traditional pocketbook injury.”
Jackson’s dissent said the majority opinion “subtly shifts from our longstanding actual-injury rule to a presumption that certain kinds of plaintiffs are sufficiently aggrieved to satisfy Article III standing, regardless of whether they will experience any particularized harm.”
“I am all for simplifying our standing law. But I am against doing so selectively; either Article III standing requires an actual or imminent injury in fact that is particularized to the plaintiff, or it does not. Bost has plainly failed to allege facts that support an inference of standing under our established precedents,” Jackson wrote.
“By carving out a bespoke rule for candidate-plaintiffs—granting them standing ‘to challenge the rules that govern the counting of votes,’ simply and solely because they are ‘candidate[s]’ for office—the Court now complicates and destabilizes both our standing law and America’s electoral processes,” Jackson added in her dissent.
The ruling focused on a lawsuit that Bost and other GOP candidates brought against Illinois over its late-arriving mail ballot law. Lower federal courts found that the candidates lacked standing to sue the state, a ruling that was reversed by the high court, reviving the legal challenge.
Bost said while he “won this initial battle…the fight for election integrity continues.” Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that supported Bost, said Wednesday’s ruling marked a “huge win for election integrity.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bost v. Illinois Board of Elections is expected to open the floodgates for candidates’ lawsuits against state election procedures, establishing clear standing for those candidates prior to the time immediately before Election Day. The ruling is likely to increase the number of lawsuits filed ahead of elections.
SUPREME COURT POISED TO SHAKE UP MIDTERM ELECTIONS
The high court is set to hear arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a case challenging Mississippi’s late-arriving mail ballot law, later this term.
The ruling by the Supreme Court on Wednesday marks the first of a set of cases that are likely to have a significant impact on the midterm election in November. The other major cases include the Watson case, along with others involving campaign finance and race-based redistricting.
