The Supreme Court on Thursday granted a Republican-backed emergency request from New Hampshire to put the state's limits on student identification cards back in force for the Nov. 3 midterm election, a ruling the state's attorney general called an important victory. In a short unsigned order, the justices stayed the Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 orders in which a federal district judge had granted preliminary injunctive relief. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only member of the court to publicly dissent.
The order means that when New Hampshire votes next month, a student ID will not be accepted as primary identification at the polls or as a backup way to prove a voter's identity.
The case, Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy, began with a law enacted this year that removed student IDs from the list of identification ballot clerks must accept. Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, then went further in his guidance to election officials. He barred student IDs even under a separate "safety valve" provision, which lets polling-place supervisors in some cases allow a person without a listed ID to vote on the strength of "any other evidence that reasonably establishes" who the voter is.
The Coalition for Open Democracy, a voter-advocacy group, sued over both the statute and the guidance. U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante refused to halt the law but blocked the guidance on a preliminary basis, and a federal appeals court declined to step in. The state then turned to the Supreme Court, where the Republican National Committee filed a brief supporting it on Oct. 16, a day after the application was docketed.
The majority relied on the Purcell principle, the court's long-standing wariness of federal judges changing voting rules as an election approaches. The one-paragraph order quoted a 2020 ruling in which the justices said they had "repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election." In this case, it said, "the district court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle."
The order does not resolve the underlying challenge. Under the order's terms, Laplante's orders remain on hold while the state's appeal proceeds in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and through any timely petition asking the Supreme Court to review the case. If the justices deny such a petition, the stay ends automatically; if they grant one, it lasts until their judgment is sent down.
New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, welcomed the decision. "New Hampshire has a responsibility to protect the integrity of its elections and ensure that election laws are applied as written," he said in a statement quoted by CBS News. He called the ruling "an important victory for our efforts to defend those laws and prevent last-minute court orders from creating uncertainty for voters and election officials."
In seeking the stay, Scanlan told the court that Laplante's order was undermining months of work educating local officials and the public about the new rules. Re-educating them at this stage "is practically impossible and risks voter confusion and inconsistent application of law, if not voter disenfranchisement," he argued, according to Bloomberg Law.
The coalition said the confusion would run the other way. Since the Oct. 2 order, the secretary of state's website had said supervisors may consider student IDs. "A stay would protect no one," the group told the justices. "It would turn away the voters who arrive on November 3 with the evidence the secretary's website told them to bring." The challengers had also argued that the law discriminated against young voters.
The application went first to Jackson, who referred it to the full court. She argued in dissent that Laplante had done no more than require Scanlan to conform his guidance to the new statute, and Bloomberg Law quoted her as writing that "the district court's injunction was reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law." She also wrote that she "would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State's electoral processes," Just the News reported.
The order is the latest in a line of Supreme Court decisions shaping the rules for the midterms, and the justices have on multiple occasions lifted federal court orders that upended state voting rules ahead of the election. It arrives less than two weeks before New Hampshire voters decide a closely contested Senate race between Rep. Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee, and former Sen. John Sununu, the Republican, for a seat Democrats are defending.