{"id":407012,"date":"2026-01-14T17:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T17:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/407012\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T17:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T17:10:10","slug":"supreme-court-revives-gop-congressmans-absentee-ballot-suit-that-could-spur-more-election-litigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/407012\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court revives GOP congressman\u2019s absentee ballot suit that could spur more election litigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n The Supreme Court on Wednesday backed a Republican congressman from Illinois who is challenging a state law that allows\u202fmail ballots to be received after Election Day<\/a>, a decision that may make it easier for other candidates to challenge voting laws \u2013 even if they ultimately win their election.\n <\/p>\n

\n The decision<\/a>, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, was 7-2 with two of the court\u2019s liberals dissenting.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cCandidates 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,\u201d Roberts wrote. \u201cTheir interest extends to the integrity of the election\u2014and the democratic process by which they earn or lose the support of the people they seek to represent.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The congressman, Michael Bost, challenged an Illinois law that allows ballots to be received up to two weeks after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by the election. Bost sued in 2022, claiming that the Illinois law ran afoul of a federal law that sets a uniform day for federal elections.\n <\/p>\n

\n Bost did not raise claims of fraud at the Supreme Court, but President Donald Trump repeatedly railed against the expansion of mail-in ballots during the Covid-19 pandemic, falsely blaming his 2020 election loss on those policies. Illinois changed its law long before the pandemic, in 2005.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cToday\u2019s ruling could open the door to a lot of litigation\u2014and potential chaos \u2013 on the far side of the next contested election,\u201d said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIf candidates will generally have standing to challenge how votes are counted in any election they\u2019re running in, that could dramatically expand the horizon of legal challenges that can be brought challenging even those elections that were completely by the book,\u201d Vladeck said, \u201cpotentially injecting more uncertainty in those critical days and weeks after Election Day going forward.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The congressman\u2019s lawsuit was effectively thrown out before it began because, a federal trial court ruled, he did not have standing to sue.\n <\/p>\n

\n Plaintiffs must demonstrate a \u201cconcrete\u201d and \u201cparticularized\u201d injury before their suit may move forward in federal court. Lower courts found that Bost \u2013 who won reelection in 2022 with more than 75% of the vote \u2013 failed to meet that burden and so his case was dismissed.\n <\/p>\n

\n Bost argued that candidates should have a kind of default standing to sue over election laws affecting their own races. At the very least, he added, the state\u2019s ballot law required him to keep staff on the payroll weeks after Election Day to monitor the counting at considerable expense.\n <\/p>\n

\n Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in an dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the Wednesday\u2019s opinion could \u201cdestabilize\u201d the elections process by inspiring more litigation.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cBy carving out a bespoke rule for candidate-plaintiffs \u2014 granting them standing \u2018to challenge the rules that govern the counting of votes,\u2019 simply and solely because they are \u2018candidates\u2019 for office \u2014 the court now complicates and destabilizes both our standing law and America\u2019s electoral processes,\u201d Jackson wrote.\n <\/p>\n

\n Pocketbook injuries are a classic harm that often get plaintiffs through the courthouse doors to establish standing and continue their case. During oral arguments in October, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh at one point referred to Bost\u2019s expenses based on the law as \u201cjust obvious standing.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n During the arguments in early October, Illinois officials had countered that candidates must essentially show that a rule change could cause a substantial risk of losing a race. But that was an argument that found little purchase on the Supreme Court, with Roberts calling that idea a \u201cpotential disaster\u201d that would force courts to play political prognosticator.\n <\/p>\n

\n Justice Elena Kagan, a member of the court\u2019s liberal wing, framed the case as a lawsuit \u201cin search of a problem.\u201d She noted that courts allow pre-election challenges to voting rules \u201call the time\u201d without running into standing problems.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThere\u2019s hardly an election rule that gets passed in any battleground state that isn\u2019t challenged,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Bost, a former state lawmaker who was first elected to Congress in 2014, represents Illinois\u2019 southernmost congressional district. He won the 2024 election with 74% of the vote.\n <\/p>\n

\n This story has been updated with additional details.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court on Wednesday backed a Republican congressman from Illinois who is challenging a state law that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-407012","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}