On Jan. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that candidates have standing to sue over election laws they believe to be unconstitutional before voting takes place.

The 7-2 ruling in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections allows U.S. Rep. Michael Bost (R) and two 2024 presidential electors to move forward with a lawsuit challenging an Illinois law allowing mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to 14 days afterward.

Bost argued that he has the legal standing to sue, stating that the law effectively extends the election by two weeks and forces him to expend resources to monitor late-arriving ballots. He also argued that candidates are entitled to have their election results certified in accordance with federal law. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires a person suing to prove they have a real stake in the case and will suffer a concrete wrong as a direct result of the unlawful action they are suing over.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the case in 2023, saying Bost’s arguments didn’t meet that standard. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal in 2024. Bost then appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to take the case in June 2025 and heard oral arguments in October.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that only allowing a candidate to sue after they could demonstrate harm would force election-related lawsuits to be brought in the days immediately before or after voting takes place. Roberts also said that requiring candidates to prove their odds of winning were damaged by a particular law would put judges in the position of predicting the results of the election.

Moreover, Roberts said that candidates had a particular interest in ensuring results were lawfully tabulated and that the public trusted the outcome: “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.”

Roberts was joined in the opinion by Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas.

Two other justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan, agreed that Bost should be allowed to sue, but only because he suffered a possible financial injury from the law. Barrett wrote in a concurring opinion that the court should not grant candidates broad standing to sue over election laws. “Congressman Bost has standing because he has suffered a traditional pocketbook injury, not because of his status as a candidate," Barrett wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have upheld the lower court order dismissing Bost’s lawsuit due to a lack of standing. Jackson said the decision could have a major impact on the volume of election-related lawsuits in the future. “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,” she wrote.

The ruling did not address whether Illinois’ mail-in ballot counting law is constitutional. The justices are slated to hear Watson v. Republican National Committee, a case challenging the legality of a similar law in Mississippi, which allows absentee ballots to be counted if they are received within four days of the election.