Every few months, the Supreme Court's emergency docket teaches the same lesson: the rule against changing election rules at the last minute applies when the Court wants it to, and the cost lands on whoever has the least power to absorb it.
The Court has now let New Hampshire enforce its ban on student IDs as voter identification this November. A lower court had ordered election officials to consider those IDs as backup verification for voters who lacked other documents. That was a narrow, practical accommodation. The justices, in an unsigned order with no explanation beyond a gesture at the Purcell principle, wiped it out. Only Ketanji Brown Jackson put her name to a dissent. Her point was simple: Purcell exists to stop courts from scrambling the rules on election officials, and that did not happen here.
The irony is hard to miss. Purcell is supposed to protect stability. But stability for whom? The lower-court order was already in place, and election officials were operating under it. The disruption came when the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republican National Committee's urging and pulled the rug out. A doctrine meant to calm elections has become a tool for winning emergency applications.
The defenders' case deserves a fair statement. Clear rules are good. Election administrators dislike mid-stream directives. The broader challenge continues, and the attorney general says the state is just enforcing its own law. Those are real concerns in the abstract. But Purcell was never meant to be a magic word that ends the inquiry, and it can't be applied only when it favors one side.
Then there's the law itself. Student IDs are issued by institutions that have already verified who the person is, and young people are the group least likely to have a settled, current, in-state driver's license. Many have a passport at home, a license from another state, or nothing handy. Singling out their IDs, while presumably leaving other forms of identification in place, is not neutral administration. It's a choice about which kinds of voters count as trustworthy.
New Hampshire's history makes that choice hard to read innocently. A former Republican House speaker, Bill O'Brien, once complained that students were "foolish" and voted "their feelings." The state's leadership has spent years trying to make student voting harder, and the target is obvious: a population that leans Democratic and, in a state with razor-thin margins in some contests, can matter. Federal courts have long held that students are entitled to vote where they live. A state that cannot openly say 'no students' can still achieve much of the same result through paperwork.
The usual rejoinder is that nobody is being barred, since a student can bring another ID or sign an affidavit. That is exactly how modern voter suppression works. No one slams the door. The state adds a form, a trip home, a challenge at the polling place, a line, a reason to give up. For a 19-year-old in a first election, a bit of friction is not trivial. Friction decides turnout, and everyone who writes these laws knows it.
Democrats shouldn't just shake their heads. Campuses, student groups, and state parties should treat this as an organizing emergency: every student in New Hampshire should know before October what they need to bring. Outrage is not a substitute for a ride to the DMV.
But the Court deserves no pass. When the majority acts on an emergency basis, changes the status quo, and offers no reasoning beyond a doctrine it applies selectively, it is not being neutral. It is picking a side while calling it caution. Jackson was alone in saying so out loud. That should embarrass the rest of them.
How it may affect me
If you're a college student voting in New Hampshire this November, don't count on a student ID working as proof of identity. Bring a New Hampshire driver's license, passport, or another accepted photo ID, and confirm the current requirements with the Secretary of State's office or your local clerk well before Election Day, including what fallback options exist if you lack ID.
