Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood alone against a Supreme Court order clearing New Hampshire’s ban on student IDs for midterm voting, just 12 days before Election Day.
The High Court on Thursday granted an emergency appeal that lets New Hampshire fully ban student IDs as proof to cast a ballot in November’s midterms. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only member of the Court to dissent.
The order stays a federal district court injunction and restores the state’s voter ID rule at the edge of an election. New Hampshire Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan had sought the relief after a lower-court reversal earlier this month. For voters and election officials, the practical result is simple: school IDs will not count.
Newsweek reported that the ruling arrives with the midterms less than two weeks away and with an open Senate seat and a governor’s race already under national watch.
Earlier this year, New Hampshire passed a law that said student IDs are not an acceptable form of identification to get a ballot. After that statute took effect, Secretary Scanlan barred the IDs from serving as a backup as well.
A federal judge first left the law standing, then reversed course earlier this month. That late turn produced an injunction against the ban and triggered the emergency appeal that reached the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decision allowing the full ban puts the state’s chosen ID rules back in force for November. Counsel for the plaintiffs say the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit had both refused a stay before the High Court acted.
The Coalition for Open Democracy brought the challenge. Its lawyers cast the Supreme Court stay as a last-minute disruption rather than a restoration of the statute the legislature wrote.
"The Court’s decision grants a stay which both the federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied, blocking an injunction that has now been in place for almost three weeks, injecting confusion into the election, precisely what the Purcell principle is supposed to prevent, and authorizing an unconstitutional policy that will deprive young voters of their right to vote."
That is the plaintiffs’ framing. The order itself notes the Purcell principle, the long-standing caution that federal courts should avoid rewriting voting rules close to an election. The majority’s stay leaves New Hampshire’s ban in place instead of keeping a judicial rewrite that landed weeks before Election Day.
Jackson alone refused to go along. Her dissent argued that the lower-court order should have remained undisturbed, election calendar or not.
She wrote in the order:
"I respectfully dissent because, even, and perhaps especially, when an election is looming, I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes."
In plain terms, she would have left the injunction intact and blocked the student-ID ban through the midterms. The rest of the Court declined that path and barred student IDs as voter proof for the upcoming contests.
Plaintiffs’ counsel praised her break with the majority and vowed to keep fighting.
"We applaud Justice Jackson for her dissent, in which she stands for the Constitution, the right to vote, and a rational application of Purcell. We will continue to vigorously litigate this case in the defense of the fundamental right to vote of young voters across New Hampshire."
The coalition’s claim is that the ban will strip young voters of a usable ID option. New Hampshire’s elected branches already made a different judgment when they wrote the law and when the secretary of state enforced it.
The fight lands in a state that has been competitive at the presidential level. Donald Trump lost New Hampshire to then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. Cook Political Report has rated the state’s open Senate seat as lean Democrat and the governor’s race as likely Republican.
None of that rating decides who may use a student ID at the polls. Voter identification rules belong to the states unless a court properly finds a constitutional violation and times its remedy with care. Here, the district judge’s late reversal is what forced emergency review. The lone dissent from Justice Jackson would have preserved that late change through Election Day.
Emergency election orders are blunt instruments. They do not settle every constitutional argument for all time. They do decide which rules apply while ballots are being cast. On that narrow question, eight justices allowed New Hampshire to run the election under the ID law its legislature passed.
Student IDs are issued by schools, not by motor vehicle agencies that verify identity under state driver standards. Lawmakers who want tighter ballot security often draw that line on purpose. Critics call it a barrier. Supporters call it basic chain-of-trust for the voter rolls.
Jackson’s dissent treated the district court’s injunction as the stable baseline that should not be touched. The majority treated the state’s statute as the baseline the public had already been told to expect before the judge reversed course. Those are opposite readings of the same calendar and the same Purcell warning.
By the plaintiffs’ own account, both the federal district court and the First Circuit denied a stay of the injunction. The Supreme Court then granted the emergency appeal in Scanlan’s case and put the ban back into effect.
That sequence matters. It shows the ordinary appellate path did not deliver the relief the state sought, and the High Court stepped in when the election was already hard upon the calendar. Jackson’s solo rejection of the order did not change the outcome.
The operative effect is concrete. Students in New Hampshire cannot rely on school IDs as a backup to obtain a ballot under the restored rule. Officials now have a clear instruction from the nation’s highest court instead of a short-lived injunction issued earlier this month.
Litigation will continue on the merits, as the coalition promised. The midterms will not wait for that slower track. Election administration runs on deadlines, poll-worker training, and public notice, not on open-ended trial schedules.
Other recent High Court emergency matters have likewise turned on whether judges or elected officials set the operative rules while a dispute continues, including when the Supreme Court refused a separate Trump administration bid on a contested federal policy. The common thread is institutional: who holds the line while the case proceeds.
In New Hampshire, the line on student IDs now matches the statute. Jackson would have matched it to the injunction instead.
Secure elections start with clear rules set by accountable lawmakers, not with last-minute judicial rewrites that leave poll workers and voters guessing. The Court enforced that baseline; one justice preferred the disruption.
