The Supreme Court Has Abandoned Its Former Restraint and Now Actively Enables Election Interference
Source: Dahlia Lithwick. "This is not the Supreme Court that refused to meddle in 2020 for Trump.." August 26, 2026. slate.com
The Gist
Lithwick argues that today's Supreme Court is fundamentally different from the one in 2020, which refused to help Trump overturn election results. Now, she says, the Court has warped its own legal rules (especially the 'Purcell principle') and lost its sense of shame about entertaining baseless fraud claims, so it keeps inserting itself into election disputes—actions that risk creating confusion and chaos while pretending to protect election integrity.
Conclusion
The current Supreme Court, unlike the 2020 Court that refused to meddle in Trump's election disputes, has removed the doctrinal and normative constraints that once prevented it from interfering in elections, and is now actively enabling chaos and confusion in the 2026 midterms.
Premises
- In 2020, the Supreme Court declined multiple invitations from Trump's lawyers to intervene in the presidential election, despite some justices being sympathetic to fraud claims.
- The Court has since distorted the Purcell principle (which discourages last-minute changes to voting rules) into a tool that it applies to itself while blocking lower courts from acting, using it selectively to harm Democrats and aid Republicans in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama.
- The 'shame factor' that once made overtly fraudulent election claims embarrassing has eroded, allowing justices to now repeat unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and 'bad actors' as if they were legitimate concerns.
- The Court has increasingly involved itself in voting cases via the shadow docket over the years since 2020, normalizing its own role as an arbiter of election procedures.
- This week's per curiam decision in Trump v. California put a lower court injunction on hold using technical standing/ripeness grounds, ignoring irreparable harm and standing doctrines that would have previously prevented such intervention (per Justice Jackson's dissent).
- By repeatedly intervening, the Court both greenlights the Trump administration's efforts to destabilize vote-by-mail systems and reinforces public expectation that the Court will decide such matters, creating a self-fulfilling normalization of judicial overreach into elections.
Assumptions
- The Purcell principle was originally intended as a neutral doctrine, not a partisan tool, and its current selective application represents a corruption of its purpose.
- There is no legitimate evidence of widespread mail-in voting fraud, so claims framed around 'public confidence' are pretextual rather than substantive.
- Judicial restraint in election matters (as shown in 2020) was itself the appropriate and comparatively virtuous baseline against which current behavior should be measured.
- Public and institutional 'shame' or norms function as a meaningful check on judicial behavior absent formal legal constraints.
- The Court's shadow docket interventions carry the same legitimacy-eroding weight as full merits decisions, even though they are procedurally narrower.
- The current conservative supermajority's composition and ideological disposition are the primary drivers of this shift, rather than purely legal or structural evolution in election law doctrine.