The court was mostly unanimous but divided on a congressional candidate’s standing–including an interesting discussion that occasionally comes up in election law about what kind of risks or likelihoods courts should be thinking about when resolving disputes before an election as opposed to after. Just a few excerpts from a much longer discussion in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections:

In Illinois, voters can cast their ballots by mail in any election. And election officials can receive and count these ballots for up to two weeks after the date of the election so long as the ballots are postmarked or certified by that date. Plaintiffs, comprised of Illinois voters and political candidates, challenged this procedure, arguing that it impermissibly expands the time in which residents can vote. The district court dismissed their claims, ruling that Plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The court also rejected the claims on the merits for good measure. Because Plaintiffs have not alleged an adequate injury, we agree that they lack standing to bring this suit and affirm the district court’s dismissal of the case on jurisdictional grounds.

. . .

. . . [P]laintiffs cannot establish the injury in fact necessary for Article III standing. Plaintiffs say that the challenged policy imposed tangible monetary harms by forcing them to use resources to contest ballots that arrived after Election Day. For example, Congressman Bost attests that he must continue to fund his campaign for two additional weeks after Election Day to contest any objectionable ballots. Furthermore, he needs to send poll watchers to each of the thirty-four counties in his district to monitor the counting of the votes after Election Day to ensure that any discrepancies are cured. In Plaintiffs’ view, the money and organization required to facilitate this operation is a tangible harm sufficient to confer standing.

We disagree. Recall that, to confer Article III standing, a plaintiff’s injury must not only be “concrete and particularized” but also “actual or imminent.” Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560. The latter requirement for standing “ensure[s] that the alleged injury is not too speculative for Article III purposes.” Id. at 564 n.2. Thus, when a claimant premises standing on a future harm, the harm must be more than just “possible”—the allegedly threatened injury must be “certainly impending.” Whitmore, 495 U.S. at 158.

. . .

In much the same way, the Illinois ballot receipt procedure does not impose a “certainly impending” injury on Plaintiffs. Rather, it was Plaintiffs’ choice to expend resources to avoid a hypothetical future harm—an election defeat. But whether the counting of ballots received after Election Day would cause them to lose the election is speculative at best. Indeed, Congressman Bost, for example, won the last election with seventy-five percent of the vote. . . . And Plaintiffs cannot manufacture standing by choosing to spend money to mitigate such conjectural risks.

And from the dissent:

In my view, the costs Congressman Bost will incur to monitor ballots after Election Day gives him “a personal stake in th[is] dispute” and a basis to proceed in federal court. FDA v.
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 602 U.S. 367, 379 (2024) (internal quotation marks omitted). Campaign expenses readily qualify as both “concrete” and “particularized”—the first two prongs of Article III standing. See TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413, 424–25 (2021) (emphasizing that tangible monetary harms are quintessential “concrete injuries”); Mack v. Resurgent Cap. Servs., L.P., 70 F.4th 395, 406 (7th Cir. 2023) (“[M]oney damages are almost always found to be concrete harm.”); see also Trump v. Wisconsin Elections Comm’n, 983 F.3d 919, 924 (7th Cir. 2020) (“An inaccurate vote tally is a concrete and particularized injury to candidates.” (quoting Carson v. Simon, 978 F.3d 1051, 1058 (8th Cir. 2020))).

The monitoring costs are also “imminent.” Congressman Bost has declared, in no uncertain terms, that he will send poll watchers to monitor vote processing and counting for two weeks after Election Day this November. As night follows day, he will incur campaign expenses to do so. Political campaigns cost money, including in the form of staffing; none of this is free. The guaranteed prospect of higher campaign costs is more than just a “possible future injury.” Clapper v. Amnesty Intern. USA, 568 U.S. 398, 409 (2013) (cleaned up). Such costs are “certainly impending.”

Congressman Bost’s increased monitoring expenses are also “fairly traceable” to Illinois’s ballot-receipt procedure and “redressable by a favorable ruling.” . . .

Resisting this conclusion, the Panel majority describes Bost’s costs as somehow entirely self-inflicted. Nothing in Illinois law, the Panel emphasizes, forces Bost to monitor the ballot count after Election Day. According to the Panel, Bost’s protracted poll watching is not a strategic necessity but instead an overreaction to a hypothetical possibility that is “speculative at best”: electoral defeat due to ballots received after Election Day that were improperly counted. Op. at 11. Such conjectural risks, in the majority’s view, are not sufficiently “imminent” to confer standing. See Clapper, 568 U.S. at 409. Nor, the Panel reasons, are the expected costs of precautionary measures taken to avoid those risks. See Op. at 11–12.

I disagree. For starters, the Panel goes too far in saying that the risk of ballots swaying the upcoming District 12 election after Election Day is only speculative. Nothing in Congressman Bost’s complaint or sworn declaration supports that view. Perhaps realizing the shortfall in its reasoning, the majority opinion resorts to taking judicial notice of the fact that Congressman Bost won reelection last cycle by a vast margin. See Op. 11 & n.3. But past is not prologue for political candidates, including an incumbent like Congressman Bost. In no way is any outcome guaranteed in November. . . .