Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has strongly criticized the Supreme Court’s recent decision to make it easier for political candidates to challenge state vote-counting rules before elections. While Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the decision, she took issue with the majority’s reasoning, describing it as disconnected from established precedent.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts and supported by all conservative justices except one, ruled in favor of Representative Mike Bost, a Republican from Illinois. The court decided that Bost, “as a candidate for office,” has the legal standing to question the vote-counting regulations in his election.

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

In the majority opinion, Roberts emphasized that according to the three-part Article III standing test, Bost and other candidates have a “concrete and particularized interest” in the rules governing vote counting. This interest exists regardless of whether the rules negatively impact their electoral chances or increase campaign expenses.

Justice Barrett, alongside Justice Elena Kagan, concurred that Bost had the standing to sue but disagreed with the majority’s rationale. Barrett argued that Bost’s lawsuit is viable not because he is a candidate, but due to a “traditional pocketbook injury.” She highlighted that the requirement to count mail-in ballots beyond election day could raise campaign costs as candidates might need to invest in extended poll-watching and monitoring to prevent potential harm caused by the statute.

The majority made short work of Barrett’s pumping of the brakes, however, by following her preferred path to its logical endpoint.

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.”