Supreme Court says candidates can challenge vote counting rules
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Candidates for public office can sue in advance over vote counting practices they contend are illegal, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
The justices ruled, 7-2, that Rep. Michael Bost (R-Ill.) can proceed with a lawsuit challenging a practice President Donald Trump has long decried: counting ballots received after Election Day.
The decision addresses only the threshold issue of who can challenge election procedures and did not resolve the question of whether the longstanding practice of tallying votes postmarked by Election Day but received later violates federal law.
Bost claimed in a lawsuit he filed with two other candidates in 2022 that Illinois is violating federal law by counting ballots that come in up to two weeks after the election.
Lower court judges rejected Bost’s lawsuit, concluding that the money he said he would need to expend on pollwatchers wasn’t enough of an obstacle to his campaign to give him the right to seek legal relief.
But Chief Justice John Roberts,wrote in the court’s majority opinion that candidacy itself is sufficient to confer legal standing to pursue such a lawsuit.
“Win or lose, candidates suffer when the process departs from the law. Thus, the long-shot and shoo-in alike would suffer harm if a State chose to conduct its election by, say, flipping a coin,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Roberts also warned that elections could become more chaotic if candidates claiming legal violations had to wait until they actually spend extra money or know that the vote tally is close enough for late-arriving ballots to matter.
“Premising standing on a candidate’s risk of election loss or failure to achieve a certain vote threshold could channel many election disputes to shortly before election day—or worse, after,” the chief justice wrote, reaffirming a 2006 Supreme Court decision discouraging court-ordered changes in the weeks leading up to an election. “The democratic consequences can be even more dire if courts intervene only after votes have been counted,” he added.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan agreed Bost had standing, but said it flowed only from the financial costs he expected to incur in sending pollwatchers to observe post-election tabulation. Both said the court was making a mistake by declaring that all candidates have standing to contest any election-related practice.
“I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates,” Barrett wrote in a concurring opinion Kagan joined. “Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant.”
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, rejecting both those approaches. Jackson and Sotomayor indicated they would have ruled that Bost and the other candidates lacked standing to pursue the case at the time they filed it, although they could have done so if they showed they were likely to lose as a result of the state’s practice.
“Alarmingly, today’s ruling also has far-reaching implications beyond Bost’s election, since dispensing with our usual standing requirements opens the floodgates to exactly the type of troubling election-related litigation the Court purportedly wants to avoid,” Jackson wrote, joined by Sotomayor.
The justices agreed in November to hear a pair of cases challenging a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive within five business days after the election. Those cases, brought by the Mississippi Republican Party and Libertarian Party, are expected to be argued in March or April.
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“Alarmingly, today’s ruling also has far-reaching implications beyond Bost’s election, since dispensing with our usual standing requirements opens the floodgates to exactly the type of troubling election-related litigation the Court purportedly wants to avoid,” Jackson wrote, joined by Sotomayor."
The solution is simple: States should return to election day rules with ballot counting beginning as soon as the polls close and mail-in-voting reserved for the elderly and the military.
It worked well for over 200 years.
Yep. Problem is, it’s tougher to cheat that way.
And here is the poster boy:
Another win for common sense.
Rules exist for a reason.
Many will go AWOL on this one.
I think it should be one man one vote... Of course the GOP opposes this because they would never win an election again. GOP: "Win to cheat and cheat to win".
It's because they know they could never actually win on merit.
I don’t ever trust that my mail in vote would be safely accounted for, so I vote in person every time. If everyone did this, Republicans would just shift their focus to voiding in person votes over every ridiculous perceived infraction imaginable, like ADA compliance at the voting site. It’s a whack-a-mole effort on their behalf to cheat by any means possible.
Mail in voting was a Republican idea to appeal to their aging base. They loved it until Democrats started using it.
It's how overseas military persons vote. So if they do away with mail-in voting does that mean our military personnel have no say in our government?
Back in 2016 Trump told his voters not to use mail in voting. Even that year he was planning to use the "stolen election" scam if he had to.
If the mail in vote helped him he would be all for it, since his voters believed his initial bullshit and in 2020 it cant help him.
Trump doesnt care about mail in voting, he cares about getting what he wants.