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

The justices currently have four cases before them tied to the 2024 election, with more possibly on the way, and upsetting the status quo would fly in the face of years of court practice, experts said.

In two casesRobert F. Kennedy Jr. has sought to have judges order Michigan and Wisconsin to remove him from the presidential ballots in those states. Kennedy, who suspended his presidential candidacy and endorsed Donald Trump in August, has argued that forcing him to remain on the ballot violates his constitutional rights and would confuse voters.

State officials in both cases argued that voting has already begun with ballots that include Kennedy and that removing him is now impossible.

In another case, the Republican National Committee has asked The justices froze a Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruling that would allow voters who made a mistake on their mail-in ballot to cast a provisional ballot in person.

In the fourth, Virginia officials asked The Supreme Court stepped in and allowed him to carry out a purge of suspected noncitizens from his voter rolls after a lower court found that he violated federal law on a 90-day “quiet period” before elections.

The four emergency petitions are scheduled to be fully reported by the end of the week, leaving just a few days for the judges to act before Tuesday’s election.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the Supreme Court generally avoids getting involved in high-stakes litigation around elections, but that’s not always possible.

The two RFK cases “aren’t going anywhere,” Muller said: 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 judges think the other two cases present pressing legal issues, they may not want to get involved anyway.

The question is whether the issue “will cause most judges to get upset and say, ‘we have to intervene,’” Muller said. “I’m not sure, and I’m not sure they want to do it on an emergency basis.”

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

If the justices intervened in the Pennsylvania dispute, they could set the stage 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 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.

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

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

He noted that many of the court decisions in recent weeks rejected efforts to change voting rules or explicitly did not apply to the current election. A decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last week, which held that a state law to count late-arriving ballots in Mississippi violated federal law, did not include an order to alter the way the state counts the ballots this year.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit by Republican members of Congress to separate the ballots of Americans living abroad over what the judge called “phantom fears” of foreign interference.

Judge Christopher C. Conner of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania noted that the last-minute lawsuit would disrupt the state’s elections.

“A court order at this late hour would alter the Commonwealth’s carefully established election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters, not to mention the state and county administrators who would be expected to implement these new procedures in addition to their duties.” current. ”Conner wrote.

A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held Tuesday that federal courts should continue to hear a dispute over voter registration in North Carolina.

Although those or other cases could reach the Supreme Court, Muller said the justices are also certainly aware of how the public may perceive their decisions.

“On another level, they are also aware of the political sensitivities that if decisions were issued very close to an election that appeared 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.