Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the Supreme Court for making it easier for political candidates to challenge state vote-counting rules before elections, highlighting Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s agreement with the decision but disagreement with the majority’s reasoning, which she described as lacking precedent.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday, spearheaded by Chief Justice John Roberts and supported by most conservative justices, ruled in favor of Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill. The ruling states that Bost, as an electoral candidate, has the right to contest the rules governing vote-counting in his election.

Under Illinois law, the rules require election officials to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked or certified by election day and received within two weeks thereafter. Bost, who secured reelection in 2024, argued that these rules conflicted with federal law.

Chief Justice Roberts, representing the majority, cited the three-part Article III standing test applicable to all plaintiffs. He stated that Bost and other candidates hold a significant interest in the vote-counting regulations of their elections, irrespective of whether these rules negatively affect their electoral chances or increase campaign costs.

Justice Barrett, with support from Justice Elena Kagan, concurred that Bost has standing but disagreed with the majority’s reasoning. She argued that Bost’s case is valid not merely because he is a candidate, but because he experienced a financial injury. She acknowledged that extending the counting period for mail-in ballots increases a candidate’s campaign expenses, as they must continue campaign activities like poll-watching to mitigate potential risks.

The majority quickly dismissed Barrett’s approach by extending her logic to its natural conclusion, reinforcing their stance on the matter.

Practically speaking, forcing candidates to “show a substantial risk that a rule will cause them to lose the election or prevent them from achieving a legally significant vote threshold in order to have standing,” could “channel many election disputes to shortly before election day—or worse, after,” the majority said.

Beyond that, said the majority, Barrett’s approach could have created an absurdity of its own.

“Apparently, a candidate who pays poll watchers a penny would have standing, while one who relies on volunteers would not,” the opinion said.

But Barrett and Kagan were concerned that majority had created “special standing rules for particular litigants,” specifically candidates for public office.

“I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates,” Barrett wrote. “Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant.”

For Barrett, Bost’s “expenditures” to “mitigate a substantial risk of harm” were enough, at least at the motion to dismiss stage, to demonstrate standing on “traditional pocketbook injury” grounds, so there was no need to invent a “broader rule” that is “unmoored from precedent.”

“So in addition to being unmoored from precedent, the Court’s broader rule is unnecessary on Congressman Bost’s own telling,” Barrett wrote, concurring “only” in the judgment. “We need not deviate from established standing principles to resolve this case in Congressman Bost’s favor.”

Jackson’s dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, repeatedly cited Barrett’s concurrence to make the case that even she recognized the majority greenlit a “dubious departure from settled law” to grant political candidates standing leeway ordinary litigants cannot enjoy.

“As Justice Barrett explains, this harm-free Article III standing rule finds no support in our precedents,” the dissent said.

Jackson went so far as to say the majority disregarded “judicial restraint” — “complicat[ing] and destabiliz[ing] both our standing law and America’s electoral processes” — by “carving out a bespoke rule for candidate-plaintiffs” where they need not show “any real and immediate harm[.]”

“I am all for simplifying our standing law. But I am against doing so selectively; either Article III standing requires an actual or imminent injury in fact that is particularized to the plaintiff, or it does not,” Jackson concluded. “Bost has plainly failed to allege facts that support an inference of standing under our established precedents.”