Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday refused to order Michigan officials to put a measure on the November ballot over whether to require proof of citizenship to vote in the state.

A group behind the measure sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court ahead of a Friday deadline. Americans for Citizen Voting | Michigan’s urgent application went to Kavanaugh because he is the justice assigned to field emergency requests from the Michigan region. When justices receive such applications, they can decide the matters themselves or refer them to their colleagues for a full court decision.

The Trump appointee denied it himself on Thursday. As typical for such orders, the denial was unexplained.

Alongside Fred Smith, a Michigan voter who supported the measure, the citizen voting group asked for a Supreme Court order by Thursday, ahead of a Friday deadline to finalize state ballots. Their lead counsel is John Bursch, who was the state’s solicitor general during a Republican administration and has Supreme Court experience representing conservative causes, including through the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Michigan officials had deadlocked over whether the measure was supported by enough signatures. The citizen voting group and Smith sought relief from Michigan’s Supreme Court, but they said the state court effectively denied their request by failing to act on it. Hence, they said, why they turned to Washington.

In their application to Kavanaugh, they said they satisfied the requirements for getting the measure on the ballot and that the rejection denied them due process and equal protection.

Opposing their application, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office called those constitutional claims novel, at best. Representing Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, the state’s opposition deemed the application “highly unusual,” one of the reasons being that it would make the U.S. Supreme Court the first court to review the issue.  

“The Court should decline to put its thumb on the scale in this manner, particularly in the case of a state administrative proceeding where a state court can provide more fulsome and comprehensive review,” the state said in its opposition filing.

Noncitizens are already barred from voting in state and federal elections. “There is no evidence to support claims that large numbers of noncitizens have voted in past elections or are currently registering to vote,” according to the Michigan Department of State, which noted that “the name of everyone who registers or votes in an election is a public record — it would be very easy to see if noncitizens were registering or voting in large numbers.”

Nessel announced charges last month against five noncitizens alleged to have voted in the state’s 2024 November general election, and one citizen alleged to have registered their noncitizen spouse to vote.

It’s the latest litigation rapidly unfolding on the high court docket, following a separate urgent request from Republicans seeking relief on campaign advertising rates by Friday. Separately, on Monday, Kavanaugh and his colleagues in the majority voted to let President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom construction proceed. And the justices are also being asked to again weigh in on Trump’s desired mail-in ballot restrictions for the midterms.

The justices have been deciding these emergency requests while on their summer recess, ahead of their return to the bench for their next term in early October.

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