Supreme Court agrees to hear absentee ballot appeal from Illinois congressman
The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear an appeal from Illinois Rep. Mike Bost who wants to challenge the state's decision to count absentee ballots after Election Day.
At issue is a lower court ruling that found the Republican and two presidential elector nominees did not have standing to sue. The Supreme Court will likely hear arguments in the case in the fall.
Bost sued in 2022, claiming that an Illinois law allowing mail-in ballots to arrive up to two weeks after Election Day ran afoul federal law that sets a uniform day for federal elections. As in other states, the mail-in ballots at issue must be postmarked on or before the election.
President Donald Trump has attacked the practice with an executive order that pressures states to abandon their post-election deadlines for mail-in ballots to arrive at election offices. His directives are subject to litigation as well.
Roughly 20 other states and jurisdictions count ballots that arrive after Election Day.
Republicans are pursuing litigation in multiple courts attempting to roll back the expansion of mail-in voting. A federal appeals court in Louisiana last year ruled that Mississippi was violating federal law by counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, but stopped short of blocking the policy before the November election.
Lower courts never considered Bost's underlying claim. A federal district court ruled that Bost and the other plaintiffs were not injured by the state ballot law and so they did not have standing to sue. A divided 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision and Bost appealed the technical question of standing to the high court.
Bost, first elected in 2014, tried to argue that his campaign was required to pay for an additional two weeks of staff to monitor ballot counting. But the 7th Circuit noted that Bost won reelection in his Southern Illinois district by a healthy margin and that he chose to spend resources to avoid a hypothetical future harm.
'Plaintiffs cannot manufacture standing by choosing to spend money to mitigate such conjectural risks,' the court wrote.
The three-judge panel included one judge nominated by Trump and another named by President Joe Biden.
US Circuit Judge Michael Scudder, who was also nominated by Trump, dissented.
'As a sitting member of Congress in the midst of an ongoing reelection campaign, he is nothing close to a 'mere bystander' to the upcoming election or the allegation at the heart of this lawsuit,' Scudder wrote.
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