Regardless of the outcome, these tactics will make an indelible historical mark on the Georgia election. In that, it’s the vanguard of a new norm rather than an outlier. Since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, in which the Supreme Court defanged federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has taken an ax to the stump of voter protections that remained.

In June of this year, the Court gave its blessing to aggressive voter purges, even those that all existing data indicate affect minority communities most. The Court has moved toward extending authorization for voter-ID laws, despite data showing the same. Adding to the Court’s finding in Shelby County that past disenfranchisement was no longer a valid factor in developing current protections against disenfranchisement, the Court argued that “good faith of [the] state legislature must be presumed,” when it upheld Texas congressional districts that were challenged as racial gerrymanders.

So far, the results have been undeniable. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, up to 2 million more people than expected have lost their voting status because of purges after Shelby County. Also according to the Brennan Center, 23 states have made their voting laws more restrictive since 2010, including six of the 10 states with the highest proportions of black voters. And that count doesn’t include North Carolina, the state with the seventh-highest population of black voters, where a battle involving voter ID, gerrymandering, and racial discrimination has dominated politics over the past decade. Nor does it include Texas, now a major battleground for voter-ID laws and gerrymandering plans that mostly affect its high population of Latino voters.

Read: How black Alabama voters made Doug Jones a senator

Proactive national measures to prevent disenfranchisement have all but been eliminated in the past five years. Those measures are the most important ones, as litigation—the only remaining remedy—requires constant vigilance by citizens and often takes place only after harms have already occurred and illegitimate elections have already been won. Even if the favored candidates of voters of color win future elections, the effort needed to reestablish a guarantee of voting rights and put the disenfranchisement genie back in the bottle will be massive.

It seems likely, then, that 2018 is a beginning rather than an ending. Whether or not Kemp or Kobach is elected, and whether the claims of suppression against them hold up in court, they are representative of the new incentives in play. The Voting Rights Act bent the status quo against itself, forcing a political system built almost entirely on exclusion toward democracy. But that job was never truly completed, and the siren song of those beholden to a shrinking demographic power has always been to resurrect the poll tax, or to reinvent it for a new age. The data are in. The new age is here.