WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday revived a Republican challenge to a law that allows the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, a target of President Donald Trump.
The high court majority ruled that candidates can sue over voting-counting rules, even if they haven't shown a clear effect on the outcome of the race.
“Win or lose, candidates suffer when the process departs from the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts. The court didn't rule on late-arriving mail-in ballots themselves, but will hear hear another case on the the broader issue this spring.
Requiring candidates to show that a rule could affect the outcome before challenging its legality risks court entanglement in elections during the high-pressure late stages of the process, Roberts wrote.
The court ruled 7-2 to grant Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., and two other candidates a new day in court, though it didn't decide their underlying claim.
Two justices in the majority, Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan, said they would have allowed Boast to sue but not any candidate for office.
“I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates. Elections are important, but so are many things in life,” Barrett wrote.
Two others, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying allowing any candidate to sue would “opens the floodgates to exactly the type of troubling election-related litigation the Court purportedly wants to avoid.”
Bost appealed after lower courts tossed out his suit, ruling he lacked legal standing because any ballots that arrived after election day had little impact on his lopsided win.
The state had argued that allowing the lawsuit would “cause chaos” with increased election litigation. Bost, on the the other hand, said vote-total considerations shouldn’t affect his ability to come to court.
The Illinois law allows ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they are received up to two weeks later. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia accept mailed ballots received after Election Day as long they are postmarked on or before that date, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The Trump administration weighed in to support Bost. The Republican president has asserted that late-arriving ballots and drawn-out electoral counts undermine confidence in elections.
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