A Recent Supreme Court Decision May Finally End Pro-Fraud Election Rules

AENN

Image by Matt Popovich.

The Supreme Court finally granted candidates for office standing to challenge unfair and pro-fraud rules promulgated by state boards of election.

Jerome R. Corsi

January 20, 2026

Matt Popovich

Last Wednesday, January 14, 2026, in a little-noticed Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the 7-2 majority opinion in Michael J. Bost et al., Petitioners v. Illinois State Board of Elections, et al. That case saw Illinois Congressman Michael Bost challenge an Illinois State Board of Elections rule that “requires election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked or certified no later than election day and received within two weeks of election day.”

Remarkably, the decision reversed the trend, which has predominated since 2020, of federal and state courts denying standing to petitioners who argue that state board of election rules facilitate fraud and/or violate federal election laws. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (joined by Justice Sotomayor) objected that the court’s decision would open the floodgates to litigation by political candidates challenging that state board election rules are not written or administered to be fair.

Jackson wrote:

Any litigant who invokes the judicial power of the federal courts under Article III “must establish that he has a ‘personal stake’ in the alleged dispute, and that the alleged injury suffered is particularized as to him.” ... Today, however, the Court essentially pronounces that this foundational principle no longer applies to candidates for elected office. It declares that all candidates have standing to challenge election regulations in light of their interest in a “fair process.” ... No matter that, in a democratic society like ours, the interest in a fair electoral process is common to all members of the voting public. The Court thus ignores a core constitutional requirement while unnecessarily thrusting the Judiciary into the political arena. [Citations omitted.]

Apparently dropping resistance to court challenges filed by candidates for political office, Chief Justice Roberts saw the issue of standing as simple:

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Under Article III 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?’” ... 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. [Citations omitted.]

Justice Roberts also made clear that the right of a candidate to challenge state election rules was not contingent on the candidate proving the rule was detrimental to his election victory chances:

Win or lose, candidates suffer when the process departs from the law. Thus, the long-shot and shoo-in alike would suffer harm if a State chose to conduct its election by, say, flipping a coin. The result of such an election would not reflect the will of the people, and the candidates would lose the opportunity to compete for the people’support. So too, similar harms would result from less dramatic departures—for example, if a State decided to discard a random 10% of cast votes. Whether these decisions help, hurt, or have no effect on a candidate’s electoral prospects, they deprive the candidate of a fair process and an accurate result.

The undertone in Justice Roberts’s opinion leaves no doubt that he has concluded that various state board of election rules and procedures are promulgated and administered unfairly, and have as their goal swinging elections against the will of qualified voters.

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Rules that undermine the “integrity of the electoral process” also undermine the winner’s political legitimacy. ... The counting of unlawful votes—or discarding of lawful ones—erodes public confidence that the election results reflect the people’s will. And when public confidence in the election results falters, public confidence in the elected representative follows. To the representative, that loss of legitimacy—or its diminution—is a concrete harm. “[R]eputational harms,” as a general matter, are classic Article III injuries. ... But they are particularly concrete for those whose very jobs depend on the support of the people. [Citations omitted.]

Justice Jackson was correct in that Justice Roberts’s fundamental argument was that state election rules had to be fair—an argument that subtly suggested state election rules designed to permit or facilitate voter fraud are inherently unconstitutionally suspect.

Justice Roberts advanced the following analogy to support the point.

Candidates, in short, are not “mere bystanders” in their own elections. Diamond Alternative Energy, LLC v. EPA, 606 U. S. 100, 110 (2025). They have an obvious personal stake in how the result is determined and regarded. Departures from the preordained rules cause them particularized and concrete harm. The same is true of competitors in other contests. Each runner in a 100-meter dash, for example, would suffer if the race were unexpectedly extended to 105 meters. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 90. Whether a particular runner expects to finish strong or fall off the pace in the final five meters, all would be deprived of the chance to compete for the prize that the rules define. The fastest to run 105 meters has not won the 100-meter dash. And in much the same way, an unlawful extension of vote counting deprives candidates of the opportunity to compete for election under the Constitution and laws of the United States. [Citations omitted.]

Whether done intentionally or not, the SCOTUS majority opinion in Bost is an open invitation to GOP candidates to begin filing challenges to state board of election rules in virtually every state in the union.

Andrew Paquette’s research, as documented on our 501(c)3 website GodsFiveStones.com, reveals that algorithms in multiple state election board voter registration files indicate the presence of secret codes that allow unprincipled people to create thousands of false records for non-existent voters who nevertheless are granted legitimate state voter IDs, making “modified duplicate” records available for use in mail-in ballot schemes.

Secret codes embedded in state voter registration files blatantly violate Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requirements that, once challenged in court, could require multiple states to abandon voter registration rolls compromised beyond repair. President Trump should utilize the Bost decision to convince the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), House Resolution 22, which has already passed the House.

We have previously argued that President Trump has in preparation a new executive order that would declare a national security emergency based on evidence that China penetrated U.S. election computers to alter election votes. In December 2025, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced that it had filed against six states—Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—for failure to produce their statewide voter registration lists, which contain thousands of voter records that violate federal laws, including the registration illegal immigrants through various motor-voter registration schemes, among others.

President Trump has repeatedly accused the Democrats of opposing voter IDs, opposing proof of citizenship, and engaging in numerous instances of mail-in ballot fraud to steal elections. President Trump continues to insist that evidence of alleged 2020 election fraud is “coming out in truckloads.”

With the Somali billion-dollar thefts of taxpayer dollars being exposed in Minnesota and Maine, and Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vehemently opposing ICE enforcing immigration laws, middle Americans are rapidly becoming aware of the extent to which radical neo-Marxist Democrats with little or no regard for federal law have captured the center of their party.

A flurry of GOP challenges to state election board voting rules could set the stage for public acceptance of a forthcoming Trump national security emergency executive order on voter integrity, with the possibility that the federal government would take over supervision of election boards in Democrat states unwilling to comply.

For radical Democrats planning to steal the 2026 mid-term elections, Justice Roberts’s majority opinion in Bost was the worst news possible. Though he has opposed President Trump consistently on many different policy issues, Chief Justice Roberts rang the bell for election integrity in a decision that armed the MAGA movement to encourage MAGA candidates running for office in 2026 to hire lawyers to get busy filing cases in federal courts throughout the land.

GodsFiveStones.com is a tax-deductible 501(c)3 foundation created by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., and Karladine Graves, M.D., managed by Capstone Legacy Foundation. As reported on GodsFiveStones.com, Andrew Paquette, Ph.D., has discovered cryptographic algorithms in the State Board of Elections voter registration databases in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, and Oklahoma. GodsFiveStones.com will now begin covering the ActBlue investigation and the DOJ investigation into the Russian collusion hoax, and will continue our work to promote election integrity.

Related Topics: Elections, Supreme Court