The Supreme Court‘s ruling this week that cleared the way for candidates to sue over election laws means election-related lawsuits could soon ramp up nationwide, well before voters head to the polls.

The high court ruled 7-2 on Wednesday that Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) has standing to sue Illinois over its late-arriving mail ballot law. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, established that candidates have the right to sue over laws governing vote counting in their elections. Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections Project, told the Washington Examiner that several different types of election rules and laws could now be ripe for litigation after Wednesday’s ruling.

“If you’re going to change ballot receipt windows, if you’re going to change ballot application windows, and so on,” Snead said, “there’s actually a lot of rules that could be affected by this in the vote counting context.”

Another case before the Supreme Court, Watson v. Republican National Committee, will examine whether state laws allowing the counting of mail ballots postmarked by but received after Election Day violate federal law. Although the Supreme Court’s ruling this week stems from a challenge to a similar Illinois law, the high court did not rule on the merits of the mail-in ballot issue in its opinion.

The Bost ruling also opens the door to challenges to vote-counting rules before votes are actually cast, meaning courts will have time to hear the cases ahead of elections rather than while votes are being tallied.

“That’s essentially the upside here, is that candidates will be able to bring these lawsuits much further ahead of an election than they otherwise would have been able to, if the lower court’s ruling in this case had been able to stand,” Snead said.

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