Supreme Court Gives Trump’s Longtime Fixation A Win

As a political candidate, Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.) — a longtime ally to President Donald Trump who was involved in efforts challenging Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory — has the right to challenge rules governing how Illinois counts votes in its election, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The 7-2 ruling was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent with Justice Sonia Sotomayor joining her.

“Rules that undermine the integrity of the electoral process also undermine the winner’s political legitimacy. The counting of unlawful votes — or discarding of lawful ones — erodes public confidence in election results and the elected representative. ‘[R]eputational harms’ are classic Article III injuries,” Roberts wrote Wednesday.

As HuffPost reported in October, Bost sued the Illinois State Board of Elections in 2022 claiming that mail-in ballots counted after an election should be considered illegal because they “dilute” the election results, generally speaking.

Bost also argued that if his campaign had to count mail-in ballots after Election Day in Illinois, it would cost him extra money and force him to divert limited campaign resources.

Illinois election officials had argued last year that the counting of mail-in ballots for a set period of time after an election — most states have rules for mail-in ballots that hinge on postmarked deadlines and more — was actually an expansion of this so-called “democratic stability.” It didn’t injure candidates or voters, they claimed, and if it did, then a candidate would need to show that harm clearly.

But for Bost — and voting rights organizations, like the League of Women Voters, which filed a brief arguing in support of the Republican candidate’s claims — even trying to show that harm was injurious.

But not according to Chief Justice Roberts.

“Under Article III of the Constitution, plaintiffs must have a ‘personal stake’ in a case to have standing to sue. They must, in other words, be able to answer a basic question: ‘What’s it to you?’ 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,” Roberts wrote.

He continued: “Candidates do not need to show a substantial risk that a rule will cause them to lose the election or prevent them from achieving a legally significant vote threshold in order to have standing. Requiring such a showing could channel many election disputes to shortly before election day or after. Only then will many candidates be able to predict with any certainty that a rule will be outcome determinative. Yet the Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election. Such late-breaking, court-ordered rule changes can result in voter confusion and undermine confidence in the integrity of electoral processes. The democratic consequences can be worse if courts intervene only after votes have been counted. Counting first and ruling upon legality afterwards is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.”

Making a candidate explain a “substantial risk of harm” would leave no one “any surer footing,” he added.

“Such an approach would force judges to assess whether an election rule is likely to disadvantage a particular candidate — determinations judges are no better qualified to make than assessing a candidate’s likelihood of winning or losing. Candidates would also have to plead and prove that voters who take advantage of the challenged rule will favor their rivals, which may require divulging information about political vulnerabilities,” he wrote.

In dissent, Justices Jackson and Sotomayor countered that theory and also noted that Bost had not proven any concrete injury. In fact, Bost won his campaign.

“Under our standing precedents, this is an easy case. Article III requires plaintiffs to assert and establish an ‘injury in fact’ — i.e., the ‘invasion of a legally protected interest’ that is both ‘concrete and particularized’ and ‘actual or imminent.’ Congressman Bost has failed to allege that the election-related law he seeks to challenge has caused him to suffer any injury that satisfies those requirements,” Jackson wrote.

Suing on the basis of merely being a candidate who could be injured was the majority “subtly shift[ing] 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,” she added.

The majority “all but ignores” this requirement and “the democracy-preserving function that it serves,” the dissent continued.

Jackson also lamented that the majority failed to explain in its ruling Wednesday exactly why a candidate has more of an interest in a fair electoral process than the very people who would vote for them.

“A public office is a public trust, and an election for that office is the ultimate expression of the will of the people, not a mere competition to be won or lost. In the Court’s telling, though, elections are a glorified national pastime — the competitors’ success is the main objective, and voters are mere bystanders who simply ‘lend their support.’ This depiction drastically devalues the role elections play in a democratic society,” Jackson wrote.

With the majority’s decision Wednesday, a tidal wave of election-related litigation could be forthcoming. Jackson stated this pointedly in her dissent, saying it would “open the floodgates” to this sort of “troubling” litigation.

Roberts, however, didn’t see it that way and paid no heed to a remote chance of it being a problem in the future.

Tucked away in a footnote of the ruling, Roberts chided that “it is neither clear why candidates would waste their resources” on “trivial” challenges.

“In any event, we address today only candidates’ standing to challenge rules that, like Illinois’s, govern the counting of votes in their elections,” the footnote concluded.

Election-related litigation, specifically around challenges to rules for an election, has steadily ratcheted up in recent years. In 2024, a group known as Issue One, a nonpartisan political reform think tank, found that billionaires in particular were bankrolling legal challenges to election rules by the hundreds, and most had ties back to Trump.

In a joint statement Wednesday, the League of Women Voters and ACLU — who also supported Bost’s claim — said the court reached the “right result here.”

“Congressman Bost specifically alleged he was directly and concretely harmed by the Illinois law at issue, which is why he has standing to sue. Like voters and voter services organizations harmed by state laws that unlawfully restrict their rights, anyone directly harmed by election laws should have their day in court,” they said.

But, the organizations added, they felt “the majority’s reasoning missed an opportunity.to confirm those broader principles.”

“And unfortunately that raises the possibility that sore-loser candidates could try to abuse the litigation process to undermine and question election results. But the opinion does not touch on how such lawsuits would play out. As always, the ACLU and the League of Women Voters will stand up for the rights of voters to cast their ballots and have their votes count,” the groups said.