# Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections **Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections**, No. 24-568, decided **January 14, 2026**, **7–2**, [[John Roberts]] writing, with [[Ketanji Brown Jackson]] and [[Sonia Sotomayor]] dissenting. The Court held that **political candidates have Article III standing to challenge the election rules governing their own races, before voting or counting begins**, because a candidate has a "concrete and particularized interest" in the rules under which votes for them will be counted. Representative [[Mike Bost]] had challenged Illinois's grace period for receiving mail ballots after election day; the lower courts dismissed for want of standing. The ruling is **standing only**. It decides nothing about mail-ballot grace periods, which the Court left for separate consideration. ## Why it matters Bost is a procedural key, not a substantive one, and it fits a specific lock: a large class of election rules impose costs that are real but spread so thinly across voters that no voter can plead a particularised injury. That is exactly the gap that sank the ballot-order challenge in **[[Jacobson v. Florida Secretary of State]]**. After Bost, the plaintiff who can allege injury from such a rule is the candidate running under it. The practical consequence is that the party best placed to challenge an election rule is now the party with the most direct stake in the outcome — which cuts in every direction, and will be used by whoever is disadvantaged by a given rule. ## See also - [[Jacobson v. Florida Secretary of State]] - [[State Ballot Position Crosswalk]] - [[Ballot Order Effect]]