Supreme Court Holds Candidate Can Challenge Election Law Governing Vote Counting

In Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), the U.S. Supreme Court held that candidates for office have standing under Article III of the U.S. Constitution to challenge laws governing the counting of votes in elections.

Facts of the Case

Illinois law requires election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked or certified no later than election day and received within two weeks of election day. Congressman Michael Bost and two other political candidates filed a lawsuit claiming that counting ballots received after election day violates federal law. They principally contended that doing so conflicts with 2 U.S.C. §7 and 3 U.S.C. §1, which set election day as the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. 

The District Court held that the petitioners lacked standing and dismissed the suit.Under Article III of the Constitution, plaintiffs must have a “personal stake” in a case to have standing to sue.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. According to the appeals court, the costs to monitor vote counting after election day could not support standing because those costs would have been voluntarily incurred “to avoid a hypothetical future harm—an election defeat.” In support, the court noted that Congressman Bost had won the last election with 75% of the vote.

The Seventh Circuit also rejected the candidates’ asserted “‘competitive injury,’” reasoning that they “do not (and cannot) allege that the majority of the votes that will be received and counted after Election Day will break against them.” Finally, it dismissed petitioners’ asserted injury based on an inaccurate vote tally as unduly “speculative,” because “the election is months away and the voting process has not even started.”

Supreme Court’s Decision

The Supreme Court reversed by a vote of 7-2, holding that, as a candidate for office, Bost has a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority decision, which was joined by Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In reaching its decision, the majority emphasized that an unlawful election rule can injure a candidate in several ways: It might cause him to lose the election, require him to expend additional resources, or decrease his vote share and damage his reputation.

“But winning, and doing so as inexpensively and decisively as possible, are not a candidate’s only interests in an election,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. He further noted that candidates also have an interest in a fair process. Candidates seek to represent the people, and their interest in that prize cannot be severed from their interest in the electoral process. “Win or lose, candidates suffer when the process departs from the law,” Roberts wrote.

The majority went on to find that the harm suffered by candidates is different from the public. As the Chief Justice wrote, “An unfair and inaccurate election plainly affects those who compete for the support of the people in a different way than it affects the people who lend their support.”

The majority rejected the notion that in order to have standing, candidates must show some substantial risk that a rule will cause them to lose the election, prevent them from achieving a legally significant vote threshold, or damage their reputation or finances.

“Candidates have a concrete and particularized interest in the rules that govern the counting of votes in their elections, regardless of whether those rules harm their electoral prospects or increase the cost of their campaigns,”Chief Justice Roberts wrote.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, which was joined by Justice Elena Kagan. While Justice Barrett agreed that Bost had standing, she disagreed with the majority’s reasoning. In her view, Bost has standing because he has suffered a traditional pocketbook injury, not because of his status as a candidate. “I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates,” Justice Barrett wrote. “Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The dissenters rejected the majority’s decision thatBost has standing to sue based solely on his status as a candidate for office and criticized the majority for “departing from the longstanding actual-injury rule to a presumption that certain kinds of plaintiffs are sufficiently aggrieved to satisfy Article III standing.”

“Anyone and everyone who is governed by law is similarly harmed by any departure from the law’s requirements,” Justice Jackson wrote. “[T]his Court has repeatedly instructed that litigants ‘may not sue based only on an asserted right to have the Government act in accordance with law.’”