New Hampshire passed a law in April removing student IDs from its list of accepted voter identification. A coalition of groups immediately challenged it, arguing it discriminated against young voters. A federal court agreed and blocked enforcement. The Supreme Court just reversed that.
Eleven days before the midterms.
The Court issued an unsigned order on October 22 allowing New Hampshire to enforce the law barring student IDs as valid identification at the polls for the November 2026 midterm elections. The ruling, designated Order No. 26A512, rested on the principle that lower federal courts should not alter election rules close to elections — a standard the Court has applied repeatedly. One justice dissented.
That justice was Ketanji Brown Jackson.
"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," Jackson wrote. The argument amounts to this: a federal judge's injunction overriding a state legislature's voter ID law is "clearly justifiable," and the Supreme Court should have left it in place because an election is coming.
The reasoning collapses on contact. The entire point of the Court's shadow-docket election doctrine is that last-minute judicial changes to election rules create more confusion than they prevent. New Hampshire's legislature passed the law. The state implemented it. Voters had months to obtain compliant identification. A federal judge stepped in and told the state it couldn't enforce its own law weeks before ballots were cast. The Supreme Court restored the status quo — the law the legislature actually passed.
Jackson's dissent frames the federal court injunction as the stable baseline and the state law as the disruption. That framing requires you to believe that a judge's order issued weeks before an election is more legitimate than a statute passed months before one. The coalition challenging the law argued student IDs should count because young voters rely on them. New Hampshire's position was straightforward: a student ID proves you attend a school, not that you're a resident eligible to vote in that state. A driver's license, a passport, a state-issued photo ID — those verify identity and residency. A meal card from a dorm doesn't.
The ruling landed just days before November voting begins, and it landed cleanly. New Hampshire's law stands. Students who want to vote in New Hampshire can do what every other voter does — present a valid government-issued ID. The requirement isn't new. The legislature passed it in April. That's six months of notice.
The unsigned order drew only Jackson's solo dissent, meaning the rest of the Court — including the other two liberal justices — either joined or declined to publicly oppose the ruling. That detail matters. This wasn't a 6-3 partisan split along the usual lines. The Court's liberal wing largely stood down.
