On October 8, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Bost v. IL Bd. of Elections. The merits question in this case is juicy: does federal law prohibit states from accepting congressional ballots after election day? But in Bost, the Supreme Court only considered the threshold issue: does a congressional candidate have standing to bring a pre-enforcement challenge to a state law that allows the state to receive ballots for two weeks after election day?

A divided panel of the Seventh Circuit found that Representative Mike Bost, an Illinois Republican, did not have standing. The panel's ruling turned in large part on the fact that Bost was an incumbent, and had won many elections by a sizable margin. The court reasoned that any late-arriving ballots might have affected his margin of victory

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