On Thursday, October 22 — twelve days before Election Day — the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a federal judge's order that had told New Hampshire's election officials to stop misleading students about whether their college IDs could help them vote.
The rule at the center of the fight exists because of Kelly Ayotte.
What Ayotte signed
In April, Governor Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 323, which removes college, university and high school ID cards from the list of IDs New Hampshire voters can show at the polls. Now only a driver's license, a state non-driver ID, a military ID or a U.S. passport counts.
She signed it on a Friday and didn't issue a statement. The law took effect in June, in time for this November's election.
Republican backers said it closes a door to fraud from fake college IDs. One co-sponsor, Rep. Ross Berry, celebrated it in a fundraising email, calling student IDs "the weakest link" in the state's election system. But students already have to show proof of address and citizenship to register, as Lisa Kovack of the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights pointed out. The student ID only confirms the identity of a voter who's already on the rolls.
Democrats warned that some high school seniors and college students who don't have a driver's license may struggle to get a state ID in time.
And it came on top of an earlier change. In 2024, New Hampshire eliminated the option for voters without ID to sign a sworn affidavit and cast a ballot — that law, HB 1569, is also being challenged in federal court.
Then the state went further than the law
That same April, New Hampshire's Republican Secretary of State, David Scanlan, put out a directive saying that "student IDs cannot be used as proof," Common Dreams reported.
A voter-rights group, the Coalition for Open Democracy, sued. After three days of hearings, a federal judge found that the state's public guidance was misleading. According to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent, the district court concluded that the plain text of the law and the testimony from both sides showed the secretary of state's statements were "at best, misleading" — and that his own deputy "conceded that he did not see any factual reason why a student ID could not be reasonable evidence of a prospective voter's identity" under a safety valve in the state's voter ID law.
So the judge issued a narrow order: in Jackson's words, it required "only that the relevant government official conform his public statements to the letter of state law." It didn't strike down Ayotte's law at all.
The Supreme Court sided with the state
New Hampshire officials asked the Supreme Court to lift that order, with support from national Republicans. On October 22, the Court did, saying lower courts "should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election."
Jackson was the only justice to note a dissent. The order, she wrote, "left the state election rule untouched." It was "reasonably designed to address alleged misinformation, not to change the law." She concluded 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."
The result: heading into Election Day, students in New Hampshire are hearing from their own state that their IDs can't be used, and the federal court's order to correct that is on hold.
A pattern for Ayotte
It isn't Ayotte's only move on this year's elections. She also said she would welcome the Trump Justice Department's federal monitors in Manchester and Nashua polls for the September primary.
What the record shows
Kelly Ayotte signed HB 323, which strips student IDs from New Hampshire's voter ID law, without a statement. New Hampshire's secretary of state then told voters that student IDs "cannot be used," guidance a federal judge found misleading after three days of hearings. On October 22, twelve days before the election, the Supreme Court lifted the judge's order requiring the state to correct its public statements, over Justice Jackson's dissent.
