The Supreme Court faces a handful of election-related cases before Election Day Tuesday, but election experts said the justices are unlikely to upend voting rules so close to the election.

The justices on Tuesday dropped two of four cases related to the 2024 elections before them – with possibly other cases pending – and upending the status quo would run counter to years of court practice, they said experts.

The court, without explaining its reasoning, rejected the efforts made two case filed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to remove him from the presidential ballots in Michigan and Wisconsin. Kennedy, who suspended his presidential candidacy and supported Donald Trump in August, argued that forcing him to remain on the ballot would violate his constitutional rights and create confusion among voters.

In both cases, state officials argued that voting had already begun with ballots including Kennedy and that it was now impossible to impeach him.

In another case, the Republican National Committee request justices to freeze a Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruling that would allow voters who made an error in their absentee ballot to provisionally cast in-person ballots.

In the fourth, Virginia officials request The Supreme Court asked the Supreme Court to intervene and allow it to carry out a purge of the voter rolls of alleged non-citizens after a lower court ruled that it had violated federal law over a “period of silence” for 90 days before the elections.

The remaining emergency petitions are expected to be fully briefed by the end of the week, leaving just days for the justices to act before Tuesday’s election.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the Supreme Court generally avoids getting into high-stakes litigation surrounding elections, but that is not always possible.

The two RFK cases “will get nowhere,” Muller said, since voting has already begun in those states and judges have rarely taken up cases involving access to presidential candidates’ ballots. Muller said that even if the justices think the other two cases raise pressing legal questions, they may not want to get involved anyway.

The question is whether this issue “will cause a majority of justices to bite and say, ‘we have to intervene,'” Muller said. “I’m not sure, and I’m not sure they’ll want to do it urgently.”

Muller said that when judges consider one of these cases, they consider all their normal factors, including one called the “Purcell principle” that courts should not interfere with election procedures just before Election Day. ballot. Muller said that could lead judges not to upset the status quo in Pennsylvania or Virginia before the election.

If the justices intervene in the Pennsylvania dispute, they could lay the groundwork for post-election litigation over the state’s outcome, Muller said.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh invoked the Purcell principle in May to justify the Supreme Court’s decision. decision to keep a Louisiana congressional map in place, despite a lower court ruling that the map violated the Constitution by discriminating against white voters to draw a second black opportunity district in the state.

On a call with reporters Tuesday, Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, said her organization is involved in some of the ongoing voting lawsuits across the country and that the courts should not upset the status quo so close to an election.

“There is a clear law to protect voters from these kinds of attacks,” Albert said, referring to the warning against last-minute changes.

She pointed out that many court rulings in recent weeks have either rejected efforts to change voting rules or did not explicitly apply to the current election. A ruling last week by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that a state law providing for the counting of late-arriving ballots in Mississippi violated federal law, does not included no order to change how the state counts ballots this year.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected a lawsuit filed by Republican members of Congress to segregate ballots from Americans living abroad because of what the judge called “phantom fears” of foreign interference.

Judge Christopher C. Conner of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania noted that the last-minute lawsuit would upend the state’s elections.

“An injunction at this late hour would upend the Commonwealth’s carefully established election administration procedures, to the detriment of countless numbers of voters, not to mention the state and county administrators who would be expected to implement these new procedures in addition to their current duties,” Conner wrote.

A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled Tuesday that federal courts should continue hearing a voter registration dispute in North Carolina.

Although these or other cases could go to the Supreme Court, Muller said the justices are also certainly aware of how their decisions may be perceived by the public.

“On another level, they are also aware of political sensitivities: if you make decisions very close to an election that appear to favor one party or another, the court wants to have an appearance of impartiality. I think there’s a reason they’ve been very reluctant to take on a lot of these election cases over the last four years,” Muller said.