These efforts have been encouraged by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. In 2013, the court tore out the heart of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that mostly Southern states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to have their election changes approved by the federal government beforehand.

That made the 2016 presidential election the first in 50 years without the full protections of the act. The result was a lower black turnout in key swing states like North Carolina and Wisconsin. This year, in a devastating term for voting rights, the court upheld voter purging in Ohio and racial gerrymandering in Texas, while refusing to curtail partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin and Maryland.

The threat of voter disenfranchisement will get worse if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed to the court. His opinion in the South Carolina case and his record in civil rights matters suggests that he will join with the court’s conservative justices to further roll back voting rights protections and other civil rights laws. If Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, Chief Justice John Roberts will become the new swing voter. That’s terrible news for voting rights.

Justice Roberts, who wrote the 2013 opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, has a long history of antipathy toward civil rights laws, voting laws in particular. As a lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department in the early 1980s, he led the effort to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race or color and remains in place. He argued in a 1981 memo that the provision should block only those voting laws that were found to be intentionally discriminatory, which is much more difficult to establish than showing that a voting law has a discriminatory outcome. “Violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove,” Justice Roberts wrote.