Ketanji Brown Jackson broke ranks with the Supreme Court over New Hampshire’s November ballot rules.
Democrats say a few dorm-room votes hang in the balance, but the fight runs much deeper.
And Jackson’s old boss settled this exact question twenty years ago.
Jackson Went to the Mat for a Card the Registrar’s Office Prints
The Supreme Court handed New Hampshire a late win in its voter ID fight, clearing the state to keep student ID cards from counting as proof of identity when Granite Staters vote on November 3.
Jackson was the only justice who signed a dissent.
Maybe somebody else quietly agreed with her. The Court doesn’t force justices to attach their names to emergency orders. But nobody else wanted to own it in public, and that tells you plenty.
The fight started with HB 323. Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte signed the bill in April, and it took effect in June. The law pulled student ID cards off the list of identification poll workers can accept when a voter asks for a ballot.
Secretary of State David Scanlan then told local officials that a student card couldn’t prove identity at all, not even as backup evidence under the state’s alternative verification process.
A left-wing outfit called the Coalition for Open Democracy sued, claiming the law discriminated against young voters. The Republican National Committee backed Scanlan’s guidance.
And US District Judge Joseph Laplante sided with the challengers on October 2. He left the law itself standing. But he ruled Scanlan went further than lawmakers wrote and let local officials weigh a student card alongside other evidence.
That order came down 32 days before the election.
Scanlan warned the justices that “re-educating local election officials and the public in a short time is practically impossible.” The majority agreed. The justices pointed to the longstanding rule “that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,” and they said the lower courts never explained why New Hampshire deserved a special exception.
Jackson saw it differently. She wrote that she would not “disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes.” And she insisted that held true “even, and perhaps especially, when an election is looming.”
Especially. Read that one twice. Jackson took the Court’s oldest warning against election-season meddling and stood it on its head.
Her Old Boss Signed the Rule She Brushed Aside
Lawyers call that warning the Purcell principle. It traces back to Purcell v Gonzalez, an Arizona fight over Proposition 200, the 2004 ballot measure that required proof of citizenship to register and identification to vote.
The Ninth Circuit blocked the Arizona law on October 5, 2006, roughly five weeks before that year’s midterms. On October 20, the Supreme Court wiped the order away without a single dissent. The appeals court had acted 33 days out.
Laplante acted 32 days out. Same calendar, same kind of law, same kind of fight.
But here’s the part Jackson’s dissent skipped. The unanimous Court that put Arizona’s voter ID rules back in force included Justice Stephen Breyer. Jackson clerked in Breyer’s chambers from 1999 to 2000. She took his seat in 2022.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter signed on too. Nobody ever mistook that bench for a Federalist Society social club. Those justices simply understood that voters and poll workers need to know the rules before the doors open.
Anybody who has stood in line at a small-town polling place knows the volunteers behind the folding table aren’t constitutional scholars. They’re retirees with a three-ring binder and a thermos of coffee. Swap out the binder a month before Election Day and the line wraps around the fire hall. That’s the whole reason the rule exists.
And the Court has leaned on it again and again. The justices cited Purcell at least five times during the 2020 cycle alone, starting with a Republican National Committee case that April.
A Campus Card Proves Very Little About Who’s Holding It
Colleges print student IDs. Not the state, not the DMV, not the federal government. A registrar’s office with a laminating machine and a camera on a tripod hands them out.
That’s why New Hampshire now sits among 11 states that refuse to accept student cards as proof of identity. The state first adopted voter ID back in 2012, when the Legislature overrode Democrat Governor John Lynch’s veto.
New Hampshire also lets people register and vote on the same day, and college towns like Hanover and Durham fill up with out-of-state kids every fall. Put same-day registration next to a card any school can print, and the security problem doesn’t take a genius to spot.
But the state didn’t slam the door on students, either. A student who lacks a driver’s license can get a voucher from city hall and pick up a free voter ID at the DMV. The challengers even pointed out that students can use their existing school card to get that state ID. So the great burden here comes down to one trip to the DMV.
State Representative Ross Berry (R-NH), who chairs the House Election Law Committee and backed the law, called Laplante’s order the work of “another Liberal judge.”
The stakes explain the noise. Fox News rates New Hampshire’s Senate race as leaning Democrat, in a cycle where a single seat could decide control of Congress. College students typically break for Democrats. Nobody on the Left is fighting this hard over a laminated card because of a love for paperwork.
Democrats Want Dorm IDs Counting Far Beyond New Hampshire
Jackson has made a habit of these solo acts. In 2023, she stood alone in an 8-1 ruling that let a concrete company sue striking union workers. In May 2026, she stood alone again in a case involving federal prisoners who wanted to challenge their convictions through compassionate release.
She has broken from her colleagues on campaign finance, immigration, and congressional maps too. Some of that is ordinary judicial disagreement. But a justice who keeps losing 8-1 might start wondering whether the problem sits on the other eight chairs.
And the student ID push isn’t stopping at the New Hampshire line. Texas Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico has pushed to let voters use student IDs in Texas.
Expect the same playbook in other states. A lawsuit lands late, a friendly district judge rewrites the guidance weeks before the vote, and Democrats call any appeal “voter suppression.” The Purcell rule is the only thing standing in the way of that cycle, which explains why the Left would love to see it gone.
On October 20, 2006, Stephen Breyer joined a unanimous Supreme Court that put a voter ID law back in force weeks before a midterm. Twenty years later, the woman who once clerked for him was the only justice willing to put her name on the other side.
Sources: Fox News, “Jackson again publicly breaks with Supreme Court as justices side with GOP in last-minute voter ID fight”; New Hampshire Bulletin via News From The States, “New Hampshire’s SCOTUS appeal puts student voter ID law in flux”; Valley News, coverage of New Hampshire’s Supreme Court stay request; Democracy Docket, “New Hampshire asks Supreme Court to ban all consideration of student IDs to vote” and “The Purcell Principle’s Big Year”; The Boston Globe, coverage of the Laplante ruling; Concord Monitor, coverage of the student ID lawsuit; Political.org, “New Hampshire Asks Supreme Court to Reinstate Student ID Voting Ban Weeks Before Midterm Election”; US District Court for the District of New Hampshire, October 2, 2026 order; Purcell v Gonzalez, 549 US 1 (2006); US Senate Judiciary Committee, Durbin statement on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson