How Courts Evaluate Election Day Requests to Keep Polls Open Late 

Election polls across the United States close at different times: 6:00 p.m. in Kentucky, 7:00 p.m. in Arizona, 7:30 p.m. in Ohio and West Virginia, 8:00 p.m. in Maryland, and 9:00 p.m. (the latest) in New York.

But regardless of the scheduled closing time, during every election cycle, somebody, in some state, will petition for voting locations to stay open late. In November 2024, for example, petitioners sought extensions of polling hours in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In Texas’s March primary election, the Dallas County Democratic Party sought to extend the county’s poll closing time by two hours, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., owing to the county’s confusing, Republican-Party-driven switch from its previous model of vote-anywhere centers to precinct-specific polling places. The Dallas County district court initially granted the requested emergency relief, but the Texas Supreme Court then stayed the district court’s ruling and reimposed the 7:00 p.m. deadline.

The upcoming November midterm elections are ripe for extension requests. Proposed new voting laws abound on both the federal and state levels; some states are still finalizing maps after a flurry of mid-decade redistricting; President Trump and his allies have teased sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement to polling places; voter intimidation is still very much a possibility, as is the ever-increasing pressure put on election officials that could lead to administrative error.

There are over 8,000 election jurisdictions in the United States across 50 sets of state election laws, and each election is a special snowflake. Judges have to evaluate the circumstances and issue a ruling quickly — these cases are usually filed and decided within hours, often without a detailed order. Nonetheless, seemingly all courts use some form of the test laid out in 2008’s Winter v. NRDC to assess emergency requests to extend voting hours.

Winter assesses four factors. First, judges evaluate the likelihood of the plaintiff’s success on the merits. Courts care greatly if voters have been denied the ability to vote as opposed to “only” being inconvenienced by, for example, long lines. Second, they look to whether the plaintiff is likely to suffer irreparable harm without the injunction. Because voting is a “fundamental matter in a free and democratic society,” courts typically treat the denial of the right to vote as inherently irreparable. Third, they ask whether the balance of equities and hardships is in the plaintiff’s favor. Courts weigh the potential harm done to voters against the potential burdens on election administrators of extending hours. Finally, it matters whether an injunction is in the public interest. Courts value voter participation, but they balance it against an interest in having firm rules that are fair to all candidates and voters.

The above is a bit nebulous — what does the “public interest” mean in these situations, for instance? In an effort to provide clarity, we’ve identified six specific considerations commonly cited by judges.

Were voters disenfranchised, or merely inconvenienced?

Parties that successfully seek extensions usually show that voters have been, or definitely will be, denied the right to vote. For example, the Mississippi Democratic Party succeeded in its 2023 extension request after establishing that ballot shortages in Hinds County would prevent voting. Also successful was the Trump campaign’s November 2020 request to keep polls open an extra hour in Nevada’s Clark County due to “immediate and irreparable injury” of voters losing their right to vote.

Conversely, in November 2024, a Kentucky judge denied the Democratic Party’s request to keep polls open in Jefferson County because the party failed to show actual disenfranchisement since the inconvenienced voters had the opportunity to vote later in the day after the county resolved the technical issues by mid-morning.

Is the remedy proportionate and tailored?

If a voting problem affects, for example, voters at five polling places, judges prefer a proposed remedy that extends voting hours at just those five polling places, not the entire county.

In November 2024, in Gwinnett County, Georgia, two polling places closed for 58 minutes due to bomb threats. In response, a judge granted the specific, tailored request to extend voting at just those two locations by 58 minutes. Similarly, an Idaho judge granted a request for relief at five polling places due, in part, to a finding that the plaintiff had appropriately targeted its requested relief.

Conversely, in the 2024 Kentucky case cited above, the Democratic Party alleged voting issues at 12 polling locations and requested the judge extend voting by two hours at all polling places in the county. The judge ruled “that the requested relief by Plaintiff is entirely disproportionate to anything that occurred.”

Did the government cause the problem?

In Mississippi’s Hinds County in 2023 and Alabama’s St. Clair County in 2024, judges granted requests for relief due to ballot shortages and defectively printed ballots, respectively. Similar considerations may have been at play when a judge granted a request to extend polling hours in Cambria County, Pennsylvania in 2024 due to a countywide software malfunction that prevented voters from scanning their ballots.

In the absence of government error, petitioners have an uphill battle. In 2024, a Wisconsin judge denied a petition premised on long lines when election administrators had committed no clear error, had ample staff, and precincts were operating properly.

Did the election administrators themselves make the petition?

Judges don’t necessarily disfavor emergency requests filed by partisan actors, but they do tend to look favorably upon requests made by election officials, which two of the above successful extensions also had in common. In the St. Clair County ballot misprinting, it was a county election official who found errors on the ballot and requested the extension. Similarly, it was the county’s Board of Elections that filed the successful petition to extend hours in the Cambria County case.

Can the order be effectively disseminated and implemented?

In granting relief, judges often consider whether an order can be disseminated and implemented before polls officially close. For example, in Maricopa County, Arizona in 2022, the judge mentioned — at a hearing just before polls closed at 7:00 p.m. — that a ruling in the plaintiff’s favor could not be communicated to and implemented by election officials before polls closed. Similarly, in deciding to deny a request for relief at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 2024, a judge appeared to consider that reopening already-closed polling locations would place a large burden on election officials.

Notably though, in a similar case filed in Walworth County, Wisconsin in 2024, the judge appeared not to mind that the petition for relief was filed after polls closed, and chose to grant the requested emergency relief.

Did the petitioner make an appropriately prompt request?

Similar to deliberations involving timing of implementation, judges sometimes consider whether a petition for relief was filed too close to polls closing, particularly if there was ample opportunity to seek relief earlier in the day. That was the situation in the Maricopa County case in 2022. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ delay in filing the petition waived their right to complain since issues were known as early as 9:00 a.m., but the petition was filed near the end of the voting period. In the 2020 presidential primary, a California judge used similar reasoning to deny relief to the Bernie Sanders campaign.

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At the end of the day, no matter how thoroughly election officials prepare, potentially disruptive issues often emerge on Election Day. When these issues give rise to requests to extend polling hours, no hard-and-fast nationwide rules govern how those requests are considered. But Election Day cases show that potential or actual harm to voters, the ability to issue tailored relief and time to implement it, who seeks relief, and who caused the complication are factors judges take into account when deciding when to keep voting location doors open past their scheduled closing time.

Stephen Richer is a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, the CEO of Republic Affairs, and the former elected Maricopa County Recorder.

Adam Ginsburg is a law student at New York University and has previously worked in voting rights and election administration policy.

Suggested Citation: Stephen Richer & Adam Ginsburg, How Courts Evaluate Election Day Requests to Keep Polls Open Late, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (May 11, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-courts-evaluate-election-day-requests-keep-polls-open-late