SCOTUS decides in favor of standing for candidates challenging voting rules
This seems like good news to me:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday backed a Republican congressman from Illinois who is challenging a state law that allows mail ballots to be received after Election Day, a decision that may make it easier for other candidates to challenge voting laws – even if they ultimately win their election.
The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, was 7-2 with two of the court’s liberals dissenting.
“Candidates have a concrete and particularized interest in the rules that govern the counting of votes in their elections, regardless whether those rules harm their electoral prospects or increase the cost of their campaigns,” Roberts wrote. “Their interest extends to the integrity of the election—and the democratic process by which they earn or lose the support of the people they seek to represent.”
The congressman, Michael Bost, challenged an Illinois law that allows ballots to be received up to two weeks after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by the election. Bost sued in 2022, claiming that the Illinois law ran afoul of a federal law that sets a uniform day for federal elections. …
“Today’s ruling could open the door to a lot of litigation—and potential chaos – on the far side of the next contested election,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“If candidates will generally have standing to challenge how votes are counted in any election they’re running in, that could dramatically expand the horizon of legal challenges that can be brought challenging even those elections that were completely by the book,” Vladeck said, “potentially injecting more uncertainty in those critical days and weeks after Election Day going forward.”
That’s certainly true. But I doubt the professor would be complaining if it happened to be a Democrat mounting the challenge for any reason.
The justice who sided with the conservative majority was Elana Kagan, by the way.
Knew it would be Kagan before I got to the end. She is the best and most serious of the three lefties by far.
I second Griffin.
Love Vladeck’s circular logic:legal challenges that can be brought challenging even those elections that were completely by the book
Yes, I missed that there was a “law professor declares it completely by the book” exception that exempts an election from investigations, challenges, and lawsuits.
Unless you challenge them you can’t know they were “completely by the book”.
(We already discerned it had to be Kagan, by the way, Neo;)
Oh, I see Griffin beat me to it.
One possible secondary impact of this decision is to increase the chances of enacting some election reform. It’s unlikely that Democrats would agree to completely clean and trustworthy rules, but it may be possible to agree to a federal standard that would narrow the period comprising “election day” and minimizing the current huge number of uncounted votes for days and weeks following.
Without some agreement to rein in the current chaos, the field will be wide open for constant and multiple challenges, especially in the states with the most lax standards. Sooner or later even our decrepit political class will recognize that it won’t be in their interests to combine votes cast with lawsuits filed as the order of business for all elections.
Challenges to elections seem to me to be, in general, in the public interest, even if the particular challenge is entirely spurious: sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say, and if the challenge is silly, it’ll be “disinfected” quickly by a recourse to facts and data.
This is the problem with the 2020 presidential election, in my book: the unswerving resistance of Democrats to a disinfecting dose of sunlight has instead allowed suspicions and theories (some very spurious, I think, but some at least worthy of further consideration) to flourish.
And I’ve wondered why they did it that way. They always insist that every such suspicion or theory has been “debunked” without actually showing their work, surely knowing that that behavior undermines people’s faith in elections – for some of them, even if the result is in their favor. Why would Democrats want that? Could it just be in order to have a useful protest at the ready? A pocket of infection that can be activated at any time, like shingles or something?
My suspicion about Kagan is that she’s an institutional politician who wants to peel off votes among the majority on the court. The other two lack the people skills to make the attempt.
why did they do this, because like their allies in Venezuela, who also use Smartmatic and Dominion, they want to instill a sense of powerlessness,
and desperation, the former extracted their ‘pound of flesh’ from Newsmax
most recently, and Dominion, well it’s under new management,
Dominion was certainly under scrutiny from Helderman, and the State TV, and their private auxiliary HBO certainly acknowledged that point until November 6th then ‘we have always been at war with Eastasia’ Orwell shouldn’t be a how to manual, then you add the Fulton County disclosures, and the fraud should be clear, but there is too much chaff, for this to settle in,
this victory in the heart of Mordor, (Illinois) is much appreciated, maybt they learned from their dereliction on Texas vs US, which only Alito and Thomas seems to acknowledge,
Well, professor, if you want to reduce the quantum of litigation, you might start banging the drums for transparent, fair, and defensible procedures. Not holding my breath.