We will hear argument first this morning in case 24-568, Bost versus the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Mr. Clement.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, Illinois counts mail-in ballots received up to two weeks after election day.

Petitioners contend that under controlling federal law, that is two weeks too long.

As a result, if the petitioner's merits theory is credited, which it must be for evaluating standing,

then Illinois is counting unlawful ballots. Those unlawful ballots could cost Congressman boss the election

or at least reduce his margin of victory, and he has to pay his

campaign staff for two extra weeks. All of that means that Congressman Bossed has standing three

times over. The Court below lost sight of that straightforward conclusion only by misreading

this Court's precedence and misperceiving candidates who pour untold time and

treasure into the election and are the ones whose names are actually on the ballot as mere bystanders

with a generalized grievance. That decision is not only wrong but dangerous. It needlessly injects

federal courts into the role of political prognosticators,

it risks denying judicial access to minor party candidates, and it shuffles election disputes

into the closest races and the worst possible context, election disputes after the election

where federal courts are in the

uncomfortable position of having to pick the political winners.

There is a better way, and it simply requires acknowledging that candidates have a unique,

concrete, and particularized interest in the rules of the electoral road, especially those

that address which ballots are going to be counted and when.

At a bare minimum, a longer campaign is a more expensive campaign,

and that classic pocketbook injury is sufficient to give Congressman Boss standing.

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