One Dissent, No Student IDs: Supreme Court Lets New Hampshire Shut the Campus-Card Door Indiana Already Closed

The U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. Photo: Joe Ravi / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Photo: Joe Ravi / Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.

A college student in Durham or Keene who planned to flash a campus card at the polls on Nov. 3 now has a simple instruction from the highest court in the land: bring something else.

On Thursday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court granted New Hampshire's emergency request and froze two orders, dated Oct. 2 and Oct. 5, from U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante. The unsigned order was one paragraph long and blunt about why: "lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election," and "the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter. "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," she wrote, as NBC News reported. In her view, Laplante had issued a targeted fix aimed at misleading guidance, not a rewrite of the law.

The fight is narrower than the headlines make it sound. New Hampshire lawmakers passed HB 323 in April, and it took effect in June, removing student IDs from the list of identification that is expressly valid to get a ballot, according to SCOTUSblog. Laplante declined to block that part. What he did block was an April directive from Secretary of State David Scanlan, to the extent it kept poll workers from even considering a student ID under a separate "safety-valve" provision for voters without qualifying photo ID. That provision lets a voter use "any other evidence that reasonably establishes that it is more likely than not that the person is who they claim to be," NBC reported.

So the question was never whether New Hampshire could write its own ID law. It was whether a single federal judge, a month out, could tell the state's chief election officer how to read it after his office had already spent half a year teaching voters the rules.

And Scanlan's office had done plenty of teaching. In his filing he told the justices it had "published student voting guides, updated polling place posters, updated its website, conducted social media outreach, produced and ran radio ads, and spoke at public events to explain how identity verification would work," per SCOTUSblog's account. Laplante's order, he argued, would have forced the state to undo all of it, "based on its own interpretation of state law, while generating more questions than it answers."

No other justice noted a dissent. The Republican National Committee had filed a friend-of-the-court brief backing the state on Oct. 16, the Court's docket shows, and the stakes are not small: New Hampshire's ballot carries one of the country's most closely watched Senate contests, Republican former Sen. John E. Sununu against Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas for the seat retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is leaving, NBC noted.

The Coalition for Open Democracy, the nonprofit that sued, argues the law burdens the right to vote and was meant to discriminate against young voters. That case keeps going in the 1st Circuit. Thursday's order only settles which rules govern this November.

Hoosiers have watched this exact movie, and our state wrote the script first. Senate Enrolled Act 10, signed by the governor on April 16, 2025, says Indiana's proof of identification "does not include a document issued by an educational institution." The Secretary of State's own voter page spells out that the change took effect July 1, 2025. Before that, Indiana had accepted student IDs from state-run universities "for about twenty years," the 7th Circuit noted.

Indiana's law drew a federal challenge from Count US IN and Women4Change Indiana. U.S. District Judge Richard Young blocked it on April 14, 2026, in the middle of the primary, and estimated roughly 40,000 college students could be affected, Election Newsdesk reported. Attorney General Todd Rokita's office appealed within two days, and on April 20 the 7th Circuit stayed Young's order, putting the ban back in force. Rokita called it "a big win for election integrity." The groups' lawyers counter that there has been no documented pattern of fraud tied to student IDs at Indiana polls.

The common thread between Concord and Indianapolis is not complicated. In both places an elected legislature set the ID rules, and in both places a federal trial judge moved to change how they worked with an election already underway or just weeks off. In both places a higher court said no, not now.

For Hoosier students heading to the polls, the Secretary of State says an Indiana driver's license, Indiana photo ID card, military ID or U.S. passport will usually do. Anyone without one can still cast a provisional ballot, then has until noon 10 days after the election to follow up with the county election board.

The merits of both cases are still being argued, New Hampshire's in Boston and Indiana's in Chicago, and either could find its way back to the justices. Until then, the campus card stays in the backpack.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.