The Supreme Court on Wednesday revived a Republican-backed challenge to an Illinois election law that permits counting certain late-arriving mail ballots, a rule critics have said can contribute to prolonged election disputes. The decision came as the court addressed who may bring lawsuits challenging voting procedures—a procedural question the majority treated as distinct from the underlying merits of whether the ballots should be counted.
The justices ruled 7-2 to send the case back for a new day in court, rejecting lower-court conclusions that Rep. Mike Bost of Illinois lacked legal standing because any ballots arriving after election day were unlikely to change the result of his lopsided win. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said “Win or lose, candidates suffer when the process departs from the law,” framing standing around the claimed deviation from legal voting procedures rather than a demonstrated shift in vote totals.
Roberts also emphasized the consequences of requiring candidates to show that a rule could affect the election outcome before challenging it. He warned that such a standard risks court entanglement in the “high-pressure late stages” of election administration, when litigation can become more disruptive. The majority said the lawsuit could proceed even though the court was not deciding whether late-arriving mail-in ballots themselves were properly countable.
While Roberts said the majority would allow the case to proceed, two justices in the ruling said they supported permitting a lawsuit by certain candidates but not necessarily by every candidate for office. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that she could not join what she described as the court’s creation of a “bespoke standing rule” for candidates, saying “Elections are important, but so are many things in life,” according to the Supreme Court opinion text described in the Associated Press report. Justice Elena Kagan took a different approach, saying she would have allowed Bost to sue but would not have allowed any candidate for office to bring such a challenge.
In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that allowing broad access to lawsuits over election procedures would “opens the floodgates to exactly the type of troubling election-related litigation the Court purportedly wants to avoid.” The dissent tied their concern to the prospect of more litigation after results are in, particularly where courts might be asked to evaluate alleged procedural issues without any clear evidence of impact on the vote.
The case centers on the Illinois rule at issue: ballots postmarked by election day can be counted if they are received up to two weeks later, according to the Associated Press report. The report also noted that 14 states and the District of Columbia accept mailed ballots received after election day when those ballots are postmarked on or before election day, citing the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The legal dispute has drawn interest from President Donald Trump, whose administration supported Bost’s challenge, the Associated Press reported. The Associated Press said Trump has asserted that late-arriving ballots and extended vote-counting undermine confidence in elections, while the state argued that allowing the lawsuit could “cause chaos” by encouraging more election-related litigation.
The Supreme Court did not decide the Illinois law’s underlying question about late-arriving mail ballots. Instead, the justices said they would hear another case this spring that addresses a broader issue involving those ballots—an issue that had been drawing attention in election-law disputes leading into the court’s new standing framework.
At the same time, the decision signals a shift in how candidates may frame challenges to election rules. Under Wednesday’s ruling, candidates do not need to demonstrate in advance that the contested counting practice would change the outcome of the race; they may proceed on the premise that voting-counting processes must follow the law.