The counting of unlawful votes — or discarding of lawful ones — erodes public confidence in election results and the elected representative. And a candidate has a personal stake in the rules that govern the counting of votes in his election,” Roberts wrote. Requiring such a showing could channel many election disputes to shortly before election day or after. Yet the Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election. In 2024, a group known as Issue One, a nonpartisan political reform think tank, found that billionaires in particular were bankrolling legal challenges to election rules by the hundreds, and most had ties back to Trump.
