The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for New Hampshire to bar the use of student identification cards as the valid photo ID required to obtain a ballot. The justices cited the principle that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.
Legislative background and legal challenge
Legislators in New Hampshire passed the law, known as HB 323, in April, and it went into effect in June. The law removed student ID cards from the forms of identification that are expressly valid to obtain a ballot.
The nonprofit Coalition for Open Democracy, an organization that assists high schools with voter-registration drives, filed a lawsuit. It argued that the law places an undue burden on the right to vote and was crafted with the intent to discriminate against younger voters.
District court order and state response
U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante declined to block the provision that eliminated student IDs. At the same time, he barred the state from enforcing a directive issued by Secretary of State David Scanlan that discouraged election officials from accepting those IDs under a safety-valve provision.
Laplante’s order, he said, requires the state to undo all of the steps that it has taken since April, when he issued his directive, to prepare for the election. Among other things, he said, his office published student voting guides, updated polling place posters, updated its website, conducted social media outreach, produced and ran radio ads, and spoke at public events to explain how identity verification would work.
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David Scanlan countered that the district court’s interpretation of state law created more questions than answers. He invoked the Purcell principle, describing the situation as being “at their apex.”
The Coalition for Open Democracy countered that, unlike other cases involving the Purcell principle, Laplante did not block a state law; instead, his order enforces the legislature’s statutes against an executive gloss exceeding the statutes’ reach. It further argued that Scanlan has already made the changes required by Laplante to his website, which now indicates that supervisors may consider a student ID along with other evidence.
Supreme Court intervention and dissent
After the 1st Circuit denied the state’s request to pause Judge Laplante’s ruling, David Scanlan petitioned the Supreme Court for relief. The Court responded with a brief, unsigned order that stayed the district court’s order while the state’s appeal proceeds.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter. She argued that the district court’s relief actually advanced the interests the Purcell principle seeks to protect, noting that the judge “issued a targeted order” that was “reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law.”
When a federal court determines that material misrepresentations are being made about a State’s election rules, an injunction to prohibit that conduct does not contribute to public confusion, it prevents that very problem.
