Will Baude

The number of votes don't matter.

Yeah.

In any case, in election law, in federal courts doctrine generally, in election law specifically, we have an exception to mootness doctrine for cases that are capable of repetition with respect to that plaintiff yet evading review, for which the two classic examples are pregnancies and election cycles.

Where basically the time it takes to litigate a case well from the district court to the Supreme Court is sufficiently long that you couldn't necessarily get an answer.

And so we just kind of looked it over.

Now, by the way, in the new interim docket world, it's not going to make sense anymore.

Like now, obviously, you can litigate a case from the district court to the Supreme Court in like a month and a half if you try.

And get a very, very lengthy opinion from the court.

Go ask the National Guard.

So, but anyway.

But in stylized fact, the basic problem is he's an incumbent.

He's one of the small number of Republicans who have been gerrymandered into a relatively safe Republican district in Illinois.

So he wins every time by like 60 to 70 percent of the vote.

And nobody thinks, including him, that these late counted ballots are going to make him loose.

I mean, you never know, but nobody's going to make him lose.

So you can see how at one level the Seventh Circuit said, well, look, what's it to you?

Just as the Seventh Circuit might say, you don't have standing to go ask us to figure out the correct vote total in the 2022 election, which is like way over.

You know, there's no reason to believe it matters to you in 2026 any more than it mattered to you in 2024 and 2022.

That was their answer.

Not so, says the Supreme Court.