In a case that has the potential to launch a tsunami of spurious litigation across the country, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared somewhat convinced Wednesday to reconsider standards around how a political candidate can sue over elections.

Justices heard oral arguments in the case of Bost v. State of Illinois on Wednesday. As HuffPost previously reported, Rep. Michael Bost (R-Ill.), who joined a bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election, sued Illinois to challenge a state law allowing the counting of mail-in ballots up to two weeks after Election Day. Bost claims mail-in ballots injure him because as a candidate, if forced to monitor the counting after Election Day or keep campaign staff during that process, he is unfairly forced to rack up more campaign costs.

Lower courts had ruled that Bost did not have the right to sue, as he could not prove any specific injury from the law and thus had no standing in the case — Bost had won his election. Standing hinges on whether you can prove a specific injury, not just come to the table with a general grievance relying on pure speculation of injury.

During oral arguments Wednesday, Bost’s attorney Paul Clement — a prominent conservative lawyer and former U.S. solicitor general under the Bush administration — made the case that simply by virtue of being a candidate, Bost had standing.

When it comes to elections, he argued, it is the candidate above all others who is the primary object of electoral rules. As a result, he argued, it is the candidate who has the most to lose if the “heavy thumb of government” cannot be contested.

“The simplest ruling in the long run is to say candidates have standing to challenge rules of the electoral road. It really is, kind of, that simple,” Clement said.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas appeared more pliant to the idea of lowering the bar for injury. Barrett remarked at one point that Bost presented “practical arguments that have force.” Chief Justice John Roberts seemed more on the fence, but open to arguments that allowing more leeway in bringing challenges would get ahead of the political quagmires of lawsuits filed close to elections themselves.

He appeared doubtful when Jane Notz, Illinois Solicitor General, suggested that if Bost wants to prove injury, he must show exactly where the state’s deadlines for ballots would cause him to lose his race.

Having the court weigh in on a lawsuit where things like polling data were considered against the odds of that candidate’s likelihood of winning or losing appeared to frighten Roberts. Especially if it occurred during a close election, or right at the finish line.

“What you’re sketching out for us is a potential disaster,” Roberts told Notz. “If the candidate is going to win by 65%, you say [there’s] no standing, but if the candidate hopes to win by a dozen votes … then he has standing? But we’re not going to know that until we get very close to the election. It’ll be the most fraught time for the court to get involved.”

The court’s liberal-leaning justices, however, appeared more skeptical of Bost’s logic, raising inquiries about whether it was at all practical for candidates to say their injury was based on the risk of losing an election.

Bost’s lawsuit was previously tossed out by a Trump-appointed judge in district court and later by an appellate court, both of which ruled he did not have standing to sue. Illinois sought to dismiss Bost’s lawsuit, and he took his fight to the Supreme Court with the help of the ultra conservative pro-Trump activist group, Judicial Watch.

In recent years, election litigation has become increasingly complex and election denialism increasingly popular. Trump and many Republicans in Congress have been leading the charge to challenge how votes are tallied or how U.S. elections are run or certified. Trump raised the specter of doubt so high about the validity of electoral rules, mail-in ballots and voting machines during his 2020 presidential campaign and subsequent attempt to overturn the election results, it culminated into a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, under that premise.

But Trump, for better or worse, had standing to bring lawsuits challenging election outcomes because the courts found over 60 times that he risked a particular injury. Whether he could prove that injury after he cleared the standing bar, was a different story: As conservative legal analysts wrote in 2022, Trump didn’t lose lawsuits challenging the 2020 election because he lacked standing like he falsely claimed from the presidential debate stage in 2024, he lost them because he couldn’t prove his claims and offered no valid evidence of election fraud.

Bost’s case isn’t yet about the merits of mail-in voting. But if he is granted standing, it will open that door to him and anyone else — like Trump — to say they are injured on the thinnest of bases.

To wit, Clement asked the judges to consider that Bost’s harm wasn’t just financial: It was also reputational. If a campaign is forced to count ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later than that, the tabulated results might eat into the candidate’s “margin of victory.”

“If you ask candidates, would you like to win this election by 60% or 51%, I think 100% of those candidates would say, I’d take the 60%,” Clement said.

But does someone’s feelings about how they would prefer to win an election rise to the level of actual injury? Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor didn’t seem to think so.

“That’s not how we think about harm… yes, fine, you might be disappointed, but that’s usually not what we look at when we’re determining whether or not someone is actually harmed,” Jackson said.

While Bost — who has won multiple elections with Illinois’ current mail-in ballot receipt deadlines in place — was speculating about harm from a decrease in his “margin of victory,” Jackson noted post-Election Day counting can cut both ways.

A candidate who wins by a narrow margin, she said, could lead to people “actually want[ing] to contribute more the next time” if they feared there wasn’t enough support for that candidate.

Sotomayor said Bost appeared to be “ignoring” precedent around the need for “substantial risk” of harm to sue.

“You’re almost arguing in a circle,” Sotomayor said. “Plausibility [of harm] is never what we’ve accepted.”

Whether a candidate must pay more to run a campaign to count the ballots after Election Day or not, “all Republicans, all Democrats get to have their votes counted not as a harm to either side, [but so] people who voted for them are going to be equally treated,” she said.

In so many words: Paying the cost to participate in an election is just part of the process for a candidate, win or lose and no matter their party.

Kagan meanwhile appeared to sniff out what Bost may really be after.

“This is a complaint that seems to be created for an ‘I don’t have to show injury at all theory,’” she said.

So, was Bost asking the court to design some “bespoke” rule that set out criteria on injury for political candidates specifically?

Clement said he wasn’t, but nonetheless argued that it only seemed fair, given the circumstances for candidates — like the need to budget their campaign for a race that could drag well beyond Election Day — there might be some consideration for them.

The Republican lawmaker has some unusual allies in the case, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters. Both groups disagree with Bost over the merits of his mail-in ballot claims but in supporting briefs threw their weight behind him, saying that allowing people to be heard on claims of potential injury had value.

Anna Baldwin, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of voting rights, told HuffPost on Wednesday it seems “very likely that the court will reverse and find some kind of standing here for Bost,” but they were still “hopeful” that the justices would do it in a way that is still “perfectly possible and in fact proper under existing precedents” on economic injury.

What shouldn’t happen, they said, is the court creating a “whole new rule” just for an election context.

“It would be really destructive to have a test that you have to have a particular kind of showing in changing an election outcome in order to challenge,” she said.

At this stage in the litigation, the ACLU, League of Women Voters and Campaign Legal Center say that while they disagree with his claims about mail-in ballots, they too have an interest in preserving access to sue when their alleged injury could be a diversion of their already limited financial resources.

The risk of Trump using a favorable ruling for Bost to advance his own agenda is possible in this era of election denialism, Baldwin said.

“That’s always something you have to be concerned about. But I think there is a way the court can resolve it based on existing precedent and not create a new rule for elections. I think creating a new rule just for the election context where it looks like something other than economic harm [as the bar for injury], that that could actually be damaging and backfire.”

Baldwin claims there could also be “real damage” done if the court finds Bost has no standing at all.

“Getting in the courthouse doors matters for everybody, and that [the access] is equal and fair is important for the rule of law,” they said.