(The Daily Signal)—The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday about an Illinois law that allows ballots to be counted that arrive up to 14 days after Election Day.
The plaintiffs, Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., and two presidential electors from the state, contend that federal law established Election Day and Illinois allows votes to come in two weeks longer than federal law allows, which would make such ballots effectively unlawful. Thus, unlawful ballots could cost Bost the election—or reduce his margin for victory.
The plaintiffs also argued the Bost campaign is further injured because it has to pay staff for an additional two weeks after the election.
Plaintiffs are represented by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
Federal law 2 U.S. Code Section 7 states Election Day for federal offices is the Tuesday after the first Monday of November in even-numbered years.
Illinois says mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Election Day but can arrive up to two weeks later.
A district court and a 2-1 majority of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined the plaintiffs in the case of Bost v. Illinois Board of Elections lacked standing to challenge the state law. In other words, the lower courts determined that the plaintiffs challenging the law actually weren’t harmed by it, so they couldn’t bring a suit.
The lawsuit was first filed on May 25, 2022.
The case should be an easy one for the Supreme Court, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.
“The decision of the lower courts was absurd,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “If a federal candidate whose election is affected by a state election law does not have standing to sue over that state election law, then no one has standing.”
The two Illinois presidential electors joining Bost in the case are Laura Pollastrini and Susan Sweeney. If plaintiffs gain standing in this case, it would almost certainly pave the way for candidates to challenge state laws that allow ballots to arrive well after Election Day.
Rather than the merits of the law itself, the arguments before the Supreme Court concerned the issue of whether Bost and the electors had standing to bring the case in the first place.
But if the high court determines the lower courts improperly threw out the case based on standing, the lower courts will then have to rule on the merits of the ballot law.
The state of Illinois argued Wednesday that Bost, first elected in 2014, lacks standing in part because there is little chance he could lose a reelection contest.
“There are some districts where the Republican registered parties are 98%; Democrats, too,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her question to the plaintiffs. “Your rule [allowing any candidate to have standing on election law] would say that the candidate who has not just an insubstantial, but a statistically almost impossible chance of winning or losing—that that candidate can come in and seek a change of that rule. Correct?”
Paul Clement, representing Bost and the electors, said any candidate should have standing in an election law case.
“As to the 2% voter, I’m going to stand with the 2% candidate. I stand in lockstep with the Socialist Workers Party, and however many percentage votes John Anderson got,” Clement said, referring to 1980 independent presidential candidate John Anderson.
Sotomayor replied, “Those are strange bedfellows you’re taking.”
Clement said, “But I’m delighted to have those bedfellows, because that’s the way we think about elections in this country.”
Illinois Solicitor General Jane Elinor Notz argued for a much stricter standard for a candidate to have standing to bring election law litigation.
Notz said “the substantial risk of losing an election” would be the key standard for standing in an election law case. Other examples she cited were “risk of not getting on the ballot” or “risk of not qualifying for public funding.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch later asked if it might be “unseemly” for a federal court to prognosticate through its rulings what candidates have a good chance and what candidates don’t.
Notz replied, “I don’t think it’s more unseemly than in other cases where a plaintiff seeks to establish standing based on a substantial risk.
“What I think a lot of people believe to be true, which is that loosening the rules for counting votes like this generally hurts Republican candidates, generally helps Democratic candidates,” Justice Samuel Alito said. He then asked why the plaintiffs didn’t include a more direct argument about that in their written brief that they filed with the lower court: “Why didn’t you pursue that? Why didn’t you try to do something with that?”
Clement replied, “When you plead a case in district court, you don’t expect to be in the Supreme Court defending every pleading that was sufficient understanding.”
The justices who were appointed by Republican presidents generally seemed more open to granting standing, while the three Democrat appointees seemed more skeptical.
However, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested it’s not clear Bost is harmed by the law.
“You could argue that he will actually benefit from the additional time,” Thomas said. “Someone has to benefit, or there wouldn’t be a risk of competitive harm.”
Meanwhile, Justice Elena Kagan seemed to be of two minds on the standing question.
“It seems quite inconsistent with our standing law to say, ‘Oh, we just have, like, an automatic rule for candidate standing.’ On the other hand, I’m sort of in sympathy with the view that this bar should not be all that high and that you shouldn’t have to say, ‘Here are the polls that show I could lose as a result of this rule,’” Kagan said. “It’s like, all you have to do is come in and say why it is that the rule puts you at a disadvantage relative to what’s come before.”
Utah is the only other state that accepts ballots 14 days after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Alaska and Maryland allow ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to 10 days after the election. Meanwhile, 10 other states allow ballots to arrive seven or fewer days after Election Day.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.