I'm about to submit my first scholarly manuscript to the top journal in my field, which has an acceptance rate of 20-25%. One of the co-authors on my paper, besides being generally well-known in this field, happens to be on the editorial board of this journal as an associate editor. Obviously I imagine that he'll automatically be excluded from the review process due to conflict of interest, but does their affiliation with the journal increase the chance of the paper getting accepted? I should note that the paper has already been through several rounds of internal revision and I've received excellent feedback so far from both this particular coauthor and others.