The U.S. Supreme Court’s latest election case is not about how ballots are cast or counted. It is about who is entitled to invoke federal judicial power before an election ever occurs.
In Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court held that candidates may bring federal lawsuits challenging state ballot-counting rules based on alleged harms to “electoral integrity” alone—without demonstrating vote dilution, outcome effects, or other downstream voter injury. The injury, the Court concluded, can lie in the process itself.
That holding reshapes the threshold of election litigation. By decoupling standing from outcomes, the Court reallocates access to federal courts toward candidates and other institutional actors, earlier in the electoral cycle, and without requiring proof that anyone’s vote will count for less.
Whether this reallocation promotes electoral stability or merely shifts political conflict into courtrooms before elections occur is the question Bost leaves behind.
Background
The dispute in Bost arose from a familiar feature of modern elections: mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day but are still counted if they were timely postmarked.
Congressman Michael Bost and two other candidates challenged an Illinois law requiring election officials to count such ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within two weeks. The candidates argued that counting ballots received after that date violates federal law, which establishes a uniform national Election Day.[1]
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case solely on the threshold issue of standing—whether the candidates are entitled to bring the lawsuit in federal court at all.
What “Standing” Means—and Why It Matters
Before a federal court can hear a case, it must first determine whether the plaintiff is entitled to be there. That requirement, known as Article III standing, reflects the Constitution’s limitation of federal courts to resolving actual “cases” and “controversies,” not abstract disputes about the legality of government action.
To proceed in federal court, a plaintiff must ordinarily show (1) a concrete injury, (2) a causal connection between that injury and the challenged conduct, and (3) a likelihood that the injury can be redressed by a favorable court decision.
Applied to election cases, this framework long required candidates to allege a concrete competitive injury—something more than disagreement with an election rule. That understanding controlled the lower-court decisions in Bost.
There, the lower courts concluded that the candidates lacked standing because they did not plausibly allege that the challenged rule would alter election outcomes, distort vote share, or otherwise inflict a concrete, non-speculative harm.
The Supreme Court’s Reframing of Injury
The Supreme Court rejected the lower courts’ approach, making clear that a candidate’s legally cognizable interests do not begin and end with winning or losing an election. Under Bost, allegations of harm to the integrity of the electoral process itself can satisfy Article III’s injury requirement.
With this decision, standing for political candidates no longer turns on outcomes. It turns on process.
The significance of Bost becomes clearer when set against the Court’s earlier election-law touchstone, Purcell v. Gonzalez. Purcell operates at the back end of the election calendar, counseling judicial restraint when courts are asked to change election rules close to Election Day to avoid voter confusion, administrative disruption, and diminished public confidence.
Bost operates at the front end. It determines who may enter federal court before an election has occurred, when alleged harms are predictive and outcomes unknowable. By lowering the standing threshold for candidates, Bost opens the courthouse door earlier—well before Purcell’s timing concerns reach their peak.
Put simply:
Bost answers who can sue early.
Purcell answers whether courts should act at all.
The space between those answers is where modern election litigation now lives.
Impact
On its own, Bost reflects the narrow question presented. Read against the backdrop of the Court’s voting-rights jurisprudence, it continues a steady narrowing of voters’ access to federal courts while expanding early judicial access for candidates asserting institutional process harms. “Electoral integrity,” as deployed here, is not tied to disenfranchisement, dilution, or exclusion; it is untethered from any showing of voter harm altogether.
That reallocation reshapes not only who litigates election rules, but when. Earlier litigation produces thinner records, greater reliance on prediction, and increased judicial control over election mechanics before those mechanics have operated in the real world. Courts are asked to resolve disputes about electoral process in the absence of concrete effects.
The Court justifies this tradeoff by emphasizing the dangers of delay. Post-election litigation, it warns, risks confusion, instability, and diminished public confidence. But Bost reflects a broader institutional choice: to accept premature judicial involvement as the price of avoiding disputes after ballots are counted.
What Bost ensures is not electoral stability, but a structural reordering of election litigation that moves disputes into federal court before voters ever participate.
Aranda Stathers is an attorney at Brown, Goldstein & Levy, a law firm based in Baltimore, Maryland, with an office in Washington, D.C. Aranda’s practice spans civil rights, criminal defense and appellate litigation. She has written extensively on the impact of federal policy changes and Supreme Court rulings on the rule of law in the United States. Learn more about Aranda’s practice, and read more of her blogs, here.
[1] See 2 U.S.C. § 7; 3 U.S.C. § 1.
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