SCOTUS Grants New Hampshire's Purcell Stay, 8-1 — the Student-ID Ban Is Back for Nov. 3

SCOTUS Grants New Hampshire's Purcell Stay, 8-1 — the Student-ID Ban Is Back for Nov. 3

UPDATE (Oct. 22, 2026): The watch fired. In a one-paragraph unsigned order issued Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court stayed Judge Joseph Laplante's (D.N.H.) order and let New Hampshire enforce its ban on student IDs for voting through the Nov. 3 election.¹ The order in Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy (No. 26A512) rests on the Purcell principle that "lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election," and keeps Laplante's ruling stayed "while the state's appeal moves forward." The vote was 8-1, with Justice Jackson the lone dissenter.

The fight is narrow but pointed: Laplante had declined to block HB 323's statutory removal of student IDs from the list of valid photo IDs, but barred Secretary of State David Scanlan's guidance "to the extent it prohibits or discourages election officials from considering student IDs as evidence of voter identity" under the statute's separate safety-valve provision. Jackson's dissent framed that as the opposite of election-eve mischief: Laplante had merely "issued a targeted order" that was "reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law," and "the relief the District Court provided actually promoted the interests Purcell sought to protect. When a federal court determines that material misrepresentations are being made about a State's election rules, an injunction to prohibit that conduct does not contribute to public confusion, it prevents that very problem."

What it means: the emergency docket's election-eve pattern now cuts both ways in the same fortnight — the Court had refused to let the administration's ballot-mail rule take effect (Sept. 14, 7-2), and here it invoked Purcell to reinstate a state restriction rather than block one, over a dissent arguing the state's own guidance was the misinformation in the case. The underlying First and Twenty-Sixth Amendment challenge proceeds in the district court; the ban governs the Nov. 3 election regardless of how it ends.