The Supreme Court handed Republicans a victory Thursday by blocking New Hampshire voters from using student IDs as backup identification in November’s election, NBC News reported.
The state’s emergency request, backed by the Republican National Committee, challenged a lower court order allowing officials to consider those IDs as supplementary evidence of identity.
“This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,” the unsigned order said, quoting an earlier decision.
State law already barred student IDs as primary identification. But a federal judge found that Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan’s guidance prohibiting their use for any purpose went beyond the law, according to NBC News.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissenter, argued the judge had corrected misleading guidance rather than changed election rules.
“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,” she wrote in the Thursday order.
The decision comes before a closely watched Senate race between Republican John E. Sununu and Democrat Chris Pappas.
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