The Supreme Court on Thursday night cleared New Hampshire to turn student photo IDs away from the ballot box in the November 3 midterms, setting aside a federal judge's order that had required state election officials to at least take those cards into account.
The order, released late on October 22, 2026, was unsigned and ran to a single paragraph. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only member of the Court to dissent publicly.
What the state changed
Earlier this year, Governor Kelly Ayotte signed a Republican-authored bill that struck high school and college photo IDs from the list of documents New Hampshire accepts when a voter registers or requests a ballot. Secretary of State David Scanlan then issued guidance telling local election officials not to weigh school IDs even under the state's "catch-all" procedure — the fallback that lets an official consider whatever other evidence of identity a voter brings along.
The Coalition for Open Democracy, a voting rights group, sued over that guidance. On October 2, Judge Joseph Laplante, of the federal district court in New Hampshire, split the question: the statute itself could stand, but the state had overstepped in instructing officials to disregard school IDs entirely during registration. New Hampshire appealed, the First Circuit declined to put Laplante's order on hold, and the state took the case to the Supreme Court.
One paragraph, and no ruling on the merits
The majority did not address whether the exclusion is lawful. It rested instead on the Purcell principle — the rule, as the Court framed it in a 2020 decision, that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter election rules on the eve of an election. Laplante, the order said, "did not point to anything that would justify deviating" from that principle.
Jackson's dissent went after the framing rather than the law. The district court's order, she wrote, "left the state election rule untouched," which is why the dispute "does not necessarily fall within the ambit of Purcell." On her reading, nothing about the state's own rulebook had been rewritten close to an election; what the judge had blocked was an instruction issued by the secretary of state on top of it.
What each side argued
The plaintiffs told the courts the measure singles out younger voters, and that the state produced no evidence that school-issued IDs are more vulnerable to fraud than government-issued ones. The secretary of state's office countered that reopening the question this late would confuse local polling places.
Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, called the decision "an important victory" and said New Hampshire "has a responsibility to protect the integrity of its elections." The ruling, he argued, would "prevent last-minute court orders from creating uncertainty for voters and election officials." The Republican National Committee had backed the state's appeal.
The number nobody has
Neither the Court nor the parties put a figure on how many voters the exclusion will actually touch, and local election officials have said it is uncommon for a student to show up with nothing but a school ID. That makes the practical effect hard to size — in a state whose U.S. Senate race is among the closest in the country, and where a few hundred ballots have decided statewide contests before.
Reporting from CBS News, New Hampshire Public Radio and CNN.
