Will Baude

I agree.

I mean, it's a relatively short opinion.

The way the court starts its analysis is it says, look, under Article 3 of the Constitution, plaintiffs must have a personal stake in a case to have standing to sue.

They must, in other words, be able to answer a basic question.

What's it to you?

Quoting a classic Scalia argument, Article 1 standing, the court's quoted before.

And they say, Congressman Bost has an obvious answer.

He is a candidate for office and a candidate has a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election.

So it sounds like a categorical rule, at least that a candidate has a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election.

Now, of course, there's a lot of election law that's not just about the counting of votes.

So already the election law listserv and such are asking, you know, what about gerrymandering?

What about six years ago, seven years ago in Gill versus Whitford?

When the court held that some voters didn't have standing to challenge a political gerrymander, why didn't they have a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in their election?

Maybe it's because candidates now have more rights than voters, or maybe because gerrymandering is not exactly about counting the votes, but about putting them in buckets?

I'm not sure.

But it's a fairly broad rule, and it's a pretty sensible intuition, right?

That, like, if it were otherwise, if you said only the candidate who might lose has standing, then there are two awkward things, right?

One is the courts now have to kind of take judicial notice of the fact that a lot of our elections are not competitive.

Like, yeah, I know there's an election in a year and a half, but nobody thinks that this guy's going to get thrown out.

Right.