President Donald Trump’s emergency appeal to limit the use of mail ballots is about to force the Supreme Court to confront a doctrine it built for one purpose – and may now stretch for another one entirely.
At issue is the “Purcell principle,” a 20-year-old rule warning federal courts against changing voting rules close to an election, reported CNN.
Every time the court has invoked Purcell before, it’s used the doctrine to stop federal courts from overriding state election rules — a protection rooted in federalism. As Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller explained, “Purcell has more weight when you are enjoining a state rule because of federalism concerns.”
Trump’s executive order would scramble that logic by requiring the U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security to screen state voter rolls, withhold ballots from unlisted voters and require tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes.
It’s the federal government imposing new rules on states — and the states themselves suing to block it. If the Court applies Purcell here, it would be using a doctrine meant to preserve state control over elections to instead shield a federal intrusion into that same authority.
“This mail voting executive order sits on the wrong side of the line,” said ACLU Voting Rights Project director Sophia Lin Lakin. “It’s a federal actor imposing late-breaking changes on state election systems over the objections of the states that run them.”
The Justice Department argues the states sued too early, before the order was actually enforced. If the court agrees, the states would have to refile — pushing their challenge closer to November’s election.
At that point, the administration could invoke Purcell to argue it’s now too close to Election Day for courts to intervene at all.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer has already laid the groundwork, telling justices the executive order “does not change anything at all about elections in any state” on its own.
While DOJ attorney Stephen Pezzi downplayed the likelihood of raising Purcell later, he stopped short of ruling it out. “I, of course, can’t and won’t take an argument off the table about what the world will look like in August,” he said.
A federal appeals court in Washington has already tried to head off that scenario, ruling that blocking a late federal change actually preserves the “status quo” Purcell is meant to protect — the opposite of what the administration might argue.
Notably, the panel cited no Supreme Court precedent for that conclusion, because none exists.
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