“The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion.
Gorsuch wrote that leaving decisions about how to conduct elections during the pandemic would lead to a “Babel of decrees” and that lawmakers were better positioned to make judgments about what to do.
“Last-minute changes to longstanding election rules risk other problems too, inviting confusion and chaos and eroding public confidence in electoral outcomes,” he wrote. “No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges. But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted.”