Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cast the sole dissent as the Supreme Court cleared New Hampshire to ban student IDs for voting just 12 days before the midterms.

The high court on Thursday granted an emergency appeal from New Hampshire Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan and green-lit the state to fully bar student IDs as acceptable identification at the polls for November’s elections.

Newsweek reported that Jackson was the only justice to break with the order, which stays a lower-court injunction and lets the ban take full effect.

The fight turns on a basic election-integrity question: whether New Hampshire can refuse campus-issued student cards as voter ID when ballots are cast. The majority said yes. Jackson said no.

New Hampshire closed the door on student cards earlier this year

New Hampshire passed a law earlier this year stating that student IDs are not an acceptable form of identification to receive a ballot. After the law cleared the legislature, Secretary Scanlan barred those IDs from serving as a backup option as well.

That left college and university students needing a different form of ID if they wanted to vote in person. State officials treated the change as a straightforward security upgrade. A federal district judge first left the law standing, then reversed course earlier this month and issued an injunction against it.

Scanlan took the emergency fight up. The Supreme Court’s stay now blocks that injunction, which plaintiffs’ lawyers say had been in place for almost three weeks. Students again cannot use school IDs as a fallback at New Hampshire polling places.

The timing sits close to Election Day. The order landed just 12 days before the midterms, a window that always raises the Purcell principle, the long-standing caution that courts should avoid last-minute changes to voting rules.

Lower courts denied the stay before the justices stepped in

Both the federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit had denied the stay Scanlan sought. The Supreme Court reversed that posture and put the state’s ban back in force for the coming election.

The Coalition for Open Democracy, the plaintiff group challenging the law, called the high court’s move wrong. Its legal counsel argued the stay does the opposite of what Purcell is meant to do.

Counsel for the coalition stated:

"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 voting-rights side of the ledger: late change, alleged confusion, and a claimed hit to young voters. The Court majority was unpersuaded. It left New Hampshire free to enforce its own ID rules through Election Day.

Political stakes in the state remain real. Cook Political Report rates New Hampshire’s open Senate seat as lean Democrat and the governor’s race as likely Republican. President Donald Trump lost the state to then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, so both parties are watching turnout and ballot rules closely.

Jackson would have kept the late injunction in place

Jackson’s dissent was brief and pointed. She framed the lower-court order as a clearly justifiable step to keep the public accurately informed about the state’s electoral processes, and she refused to disturb it with an election so near.

She wrote:

"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 standing and kept the student-ID ban on hold through the midterms. Eight colleagues went the other way. The result is familiar to readers who have watched Jackson stand alone on election-related emergency orders.

The coalition’s lawyers praised her position and pledged to keep litigating. Counsel added:

"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."

That fight will continue on the merits after the election. For now, the operative rule on the ground is the one the legislature wrote and the Secretary of State defended: no student IDs as voter identification in New Hampshire.

Emergency docket fights keep exposing the same divide

Cases like this land on the Court’s emergency docket, where speed matters and full opinions are often thin. Jackson has assailed the high court for fast-tracking emergency docket cases in other disputes, and this order fits the same pattern of rapid intervention close to an election calendar.

The majority’s stay restores the status quo the state enacted earlier this year. The district judge’s late reversal is what got frozen. Voters heading to the polls will face the ID rules New Hampshire’s elected officials put in place, not the temporary injunction that briefly suspended them.

Other recent emergency matters have shown the same Court willing to clear state and federal enforcement choices when lower courts block them late. One example is the decision that cleared the way for resumed third-country deportations. The through-line is institutional: the justices are prepared to unwind last-minute judicial freezes when a state or the executive branch seeks to enforce enacted policy.

Here the policy is voter ID. New Hampshire decided student cards do not meet the standard. Scanlan enforced that decision. The Supreme Court refused to leave a late injunction in place. Jackson alone would have done so.

Election integrity starts with knowing who is casting the ballot. States have long set those rules. When a lone justice prefers a federal injunction over a state ID law days before voters show up, the gap between the Court majority and its most progressive member is not hard to see.