Supreme Court Lets New Hampshire Tell Poll Workers to Skip Student IDs, 12 Days Before the Election

Through the November 3 election, New Hampshire election officials can follow a state directive that tells them not to treat a student ID as evidence of who a voter is, after the Supreme Court on Thursday paused the federal order that had stopped them. The unsigned order in Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy (No. 26A512) runs one paragraph and leaves the case moving through the lower courts, SCOTUSblog reported, twelve days before voting ends.

Two layers, and only one was in play

HB 323 passed the Legislature on a partisan basis, and Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed it on April 3. It took effect June 2 and requires a government-issued photo ID such as a driver's license or passport, NHPR reported. SCOTUSblog describes its effect more narrowly: it removed student ID cards from the forms of identification that are expressly valid for obtaining a ballot.

A second provision, which Judge Joseph Laplante called a safety valve, lets an official consider other evidence when a voter cannot prove identity with a listed ID. NBC News quoted the statute as covering evidence that "reasonably establishes that it is more likely than not" the person is who they say they are. A student ID can be that evidence, and in April Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, issued a directive that Laplante found discouraged officials from treating it that way.

On October 2 Laplante, sitting in Concord, declined to block HB 323 itself. He enjoined the directive "to the extent it prohibits or discourages election officials" from considering student IDs as evidence of identity, writing that "the State has offered no independent justification for that broader prohibition," according to NHPR. The 1st Circuit refused to pause that ruling, which sent Scanlan to the Supreme Court.

What the majority wrote, and the one dissent

The majority relied on the Purcell principle, which discourages federal courts from changing election rules close to an election. It wrote that "lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election," and that the district court "did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle." SCOTUSblog's account mentions no concurrence.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only dissenter. As SCOTUSblog quoted her, Laplante "issued a targeted order" meant to address alleged misinformation and not to change the law, and the relief "actually promoted the interests Purcell sought to protect." NBC News quoted a shorter line: "I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal court order."

The arguments each side made

Scanlan told the court that complying with Laplante's order would mean undoing work done since April: student voting guides, updated posters and website, social media outreach and radio ads. He argued the Purcell concern is strongest in that situation. The Attorney General's office told WCAX that New Hampshire has "a strong interest in ensuring that its election laws are applied consistently" and that officials need "clear, workable guidance."

The Coalition for Open Democracy, a nonprofit that helps high schools run voter-registration drives, said this is not the usual Purcell case, because Laplante did not block a state law. In its telling, he enforced the legislature's statutes against an executive interpretation, and the Secretary's revised website guidance is the real status quo. The group also argues HB 323 burdens the right to vote and was written to discriminate against young voters. State Rep. Russ Muirhead, a Democrat and Dartmouth politics professor, said, as WCAX reported, that "students can use their student IDs to prove that they are who they say they are."

What the reporting does not settle

Accounts differ on how far the stay reaches. NBC News reads the order as meaning student IDs also cannot serve as backup ID, while SCOTUSblog describes a stay of a lower-court injunction, and the safety-valve language in the statute itself has not changed. Whether a poll worker who accepts a student ID anyway would be breaking the law is not answered in any account reviewed.

This piece runs on secondary reporting for the exact wording of both orders. The Supreme Court docket page loaded, but the district court order was an unreadable PDF and the order text itself was not retrievable. No source reviewed counts how many New Hampshire students lack another listed ID, or says how often the Court grants stays of this kind, so the scale of the effect and the base rate are both unknown.

The practical test comes at the polls over the next twelve days. The Coalition's lawyers told NHPR they will keep asking Laplante to strike HB 323 down entirely, and that case continues past November 3.