It is no longer acceptable—at least in theory—for state legislators to announce that a particular restriction advances an interest in women’s health and to expect courts and the public to take them at their word. The same goes for, as it turns out, voting rights.

The message from Wisconsin and Texas is clear: If a state is going to claim that a particular law is going to fix a particular problem, that state needs to prove it. Courts will not rubber-stamp laws that needlessly burden constitutional rights without actually doing anything to fix the problem they were supposedly enacted to fix.

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It has been a good summer for reproductive rights advocates. A little over a month ago, the U.S. Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt struck down two burdensome restrictions in a Texas omnibus anti-abortion law. The Court’s opinion was so data and fact-driven, it signaled to reproductive rights advocates that science and evidence had finally made a comeback in the courts, especially when it comes to laws that burden constitutional rights.

It is no longer acceptable—at least in theory—for state legislators to announce that a particular restriction advances an interest in women’s health and to expect courts and the public to take them at their word.

The same goes for, as it turns out, voting rights.

Conservative legislators across the country have been complaining about voter fraud for years. As soon as the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, states like Texas and North Carolina rushed to enact and implement legislation requiring voter identification, which disproportionately disenfranchised Black and Latino voters. And even though no state has been able to offer proof of any in-person voter fraud crisis—because no such crisis exists—that hasn’t stopped states from continuing to pass laws aimed at slaying the phantom voter fraud demons.

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But there has been a palpable momentum shift in the GOP’s war on voting: Voting rights advocates seem to be winning, with a little help from Whole Woman’s Health.

It may surprise you that Whole Woman’s Health has popped up in cases involving voter ID laws. But since Whole Woman’s Health’s victory in June, four states have seen their voter ID laws either weakened or eliminated entirely. Two of the decisions in those cases, Wisconsin’s and Texas’, specifically reference Whole Woman’s Health.

First, in Wisconsin, a district court judge cited Whole Woman’s Health in a decision weakening that state’s voter ID law. There, District Court Judge Lynn Adelman ruled that voters who were unable to obtain voter ID could still vote by signing an affidavit as to their identity. Wisconsin protested that the court’s affidavit fail-safe provision would undermine the integrity of Wisconsin’s elections, but offered no proof to back up its claim.

“The Supreme Court recently reiterated that where a state law burdens a constitutional right, the state must produce evidence supporting its claim that the burden is necessary to further the state’s claimed interests,” Adelman wrote, citing Whole Woman’s Health. Evidence. Not just baseless, transparently false claims about a law’s purpose, but evidence.

And in Texas, two Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges cited Whole Woman’s Health in a concurring opinion invalidating Texas’ voter ID law. Amazingly, even a full panel of the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’s voter ID law disproportionately burdened Black and Latino voters, and therefore violated the Voting Rights Act.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Stephen Higginson acknowledged that combating voter fraud and promoting voter confidence were legitimate state interests, but, he said, again citing Whole Woman’s Health, simply asserting those interests doesn’t immunize a voter ID law from all challenges.

“[A]s the Supreme Court recently reminded [us], that a state interest is legitimate does not necessarily mean courts should ignore evidence of whether a specific law advances that interest or imposes needless burdens,” he wrote for himself and Judge Gregg Costa.

The message from Wisconsin and Texas is clear: If a state is going to claim that a particular law is going to fix a particular problem, that state needs to prove it. Courts will not rubber-stamp laws that needlessly burden constitutional rights without actually doing anything to fix the problem they were supposedly enacted to fix. And that’s a noticeable shift stemming from Whole Woman’s Health.

Other crucial voting rights victories this month have, as Stephen Colbert might put it, a Whole Woman’s Healthiness about them.

In North Carolina, while Whole Woman’s Health was not featured in the the Circuit Court of Appeals’ defenestration of that state’s sweeping election law, you can certainly feel its presence.

North Carolina passed its sweeping law after requesting data that showed which voting mechanisms Black people used the most, and then eliminating those mechanisms. For example, the racial data the legislature received showed that Black voters disproportionately used early voting in 2008 and 2012. So, North Carolina eliminated the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from 17 to ten days.

The Fourth Circuit ripped North Carolina to shreds for it.

“Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for a unanimous court, “they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.”

In other words, North Carolina’s voter ID provision was about as useful at combating voter fraud and promoting voter confidence as the admitting privileges and ambulatory surgical center provisions in Texas’ HB 2 were at promoting women’s health and safety: that is to say, not very useful at all.

In Michigan, District Court Judge Gershwin A. Drain expressed skepticism at Michigan Republicans’ rationale for banning straight-party voting. Michigan claimed that the prohibition would help “preserve the purity of elections,” and “guard against abuses of the elective franchise.” The state also argued that the law would demand that voters be more knowledgeable about candidates and would encourage voters to make selections based on criteria other than party affiliation.

But Michigan didn’t submit any evidence to prove its claims, and Judge Drain wasn’t buying it.

“Michigan has not demonstrated how straight-party voting has damaged, or could possibly damage, the ‘purity’ of the election process,” District Court Judge Gershwin A. Drain wrote. “There is nothing ‘impure’ or ‘disengaged’ about choosing to vote for every candidate affiliated with, for example, the Republican Party,” Drain continued.

“Moreover, the idea that voting one’s party reflects ignorance or disengagement is, ironically, disconnected from reality,” he continued. “Even if ‘disengaged’ voting was problematic—and it is not—the Court finds that [the law] does nothing to encourage voters to be any more ‘engaged.’”

In North Dakota, plaintiffs challenged a law that required voters to present certain forms of voter ID and that did not have a “fail safe” provision which would enable a person who did not have the required voter ID to vote, which had existed before the law’s implementation in 2013. Plaintiffs claimed that the law severely burdened the Native American population in North Dakota, and submitted affidavits, studies, surveys, and other data in order to prove it. In response, North Dakota submitted nothing—not a shred of evidence that would back up its claim that the voter ID law was necessary to combat voter fraud.

Nothing wasn’t enough for Judge Daniel L. Hovland, who blocked the law.

“The undisputed evidence before the Court reveals that overcoming these obstacles can be difficult, particularly for an impoverished Native American,” he wrote.

Recognizing North Dakota had a valid interest in preventing voter fraud and promoting voter confidence, Hovland ruled that “those interests would not be undermined by allowing Native American voters, or any other voters who cannot obtain an ID, to present an affidavit or declaration in lieu of one of the four forms of permissible voter IDs.”

“No eligible voter, regardless of their station in life, should be denied the opportunity to vote,” Hovland said.

The losses suffered by Republican-dominated legislatures in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and North Dakota, combined with federal court decisions striking down other voter restrictions in Kansas and Ohio (both decisions pre-date Whole Woman’s Health but certainly fit into a post-Whole Woman’s Health zeitgeist) suggests that judges are, as Mark Joseph Stern put it in Slate, “fed up with being treated like dolts by Republican legislators who lie through their teeth about the intent of draconian voting restrictions.”

Whole Woman’s Health has provided those irritated judges extra ammunition to shoot down unnecessary voter ID laws.

In a post-Whole Woman’s Health world, courts do not have to simply accept whatever lies a legislature decides to tell as “legislative fact.” If when a legislature says “to promote women’s health and safety,” it is nevertheless apparent that it means “to reduce abortion access,” then that law will not, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it in her two-paragraph Whole Woman’s Health concurrence, survive judicial inspection.

The same can be said of voting rights. Courts do not have to accept “to preserve the integrity of elections” as an explanation when the obvious goal is “to keep people of color from voting.”

States can still say anything. But now, it’s more likely that they’ll have to prove it.