Supreme Court backs Republicans on New Hampshire voter IDs

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. Supreme Court lifted a ruling that would have allowed use of student-ID cards to help show eligibility to vote in New Hampshire, siding with Republicans in a state where Democrats are defending a Senate seat next month.

Over a dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the nation’s highest court said in an order Thursday that a federal judge’s Oct. 2 order came too close to the election to take effect. 

With polls showing young voters heavily favoring Democrats, the ruling could give Republicans a modest boost in the midterms as they seek to flip the New Hampshire seat as part of their fight to retain control of Congress. Recent New Hampshire polls have shown Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas ahead of the Republican nominee, former Sen. John Sununu.

The high court order reinstates restrictions imposed by Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan on the use of student IDs at the polls on Nov. 3. Scanlan’s rules were part of the guidance he issued after the state enacted a new law removing student IDs from the list of identifications ballot clerks were required to accept.

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Scanlan went a step further, precluding the use of student IDs under a separate “safety valve” provision that says polling-place supervisors in some cases can let people vote even if they lack one of the listed forms of identification. The provision says those people can prove their identity through “any other evidence that reasonably establishes” who the voter is.

The Coalition for Open Democracy, a voter-advocacy group, sued to challenge both the new law and Scanlan’s guidance. US District Judge Joseph Laplante refused to halt the new statute but blocked the guidance on a preliminary basis. A federal appeals court then declined to intervene.

The ruling is the latest in a line of Supreme Court decisions shaping the rules that will apply to the midterm elections. The justices on multiple occasions have lifted federal court orders that upended state voting rules in the run-up to the election.

“This court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,” the court said in its one-paragraph decision Thursday. “Here, the district court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle.”

Jackson said the judge was merely requiring Scanlan to conform his guidance to the requirements under the new statute. “The district court’s injunction was reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law,” she wrote.

In turning to the Supreme Court, Scanlan said Laplante’s order was undermining months of work educating local officials and the public about the changes. Re-educating them at this stage “is practically impossible and risks voter confusion and inconsistent application of law, if not voter disenfranchisement,” Scanlan said.

The Coalition for Open Democracy said Supreme Court intervention would only foster more confusion, given that the secretary of state’s website has said since the Oct. 2 order that supervisors may consider student IDs.

“A stay would protect no one,” the group argued. “It would turn away the voters who arrive on November 3 with the evidence the secretary’s website told them to bring.”

The case is Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy, 26A512.

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