With that history of behavior in full view, federal courts moved to allow the decree to expire in December 2017, a decision that was finalized Tuesday by a federal district court. For the first time in three decades, the RNC can pursue ballot-security measures without court preclearance.

The question is whether an unfettered RNC will return to the vote-challenging and poll-watching practices that were repeatedly found to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Even during the decades when the Republican National Committee was under court order, schemes like challenging voters with undeliverable mail, known as “voter caging,” have flourished. Similarly, states have pursued initiatives, like voter ID, to address the undocumented specter of widespread voter fraud. Yet, as the University of California, Irvine, School of Law professor Rick Hasen argued in November at Slate, it’s unlikely that the RNC itself will be directly challenging votes in the near future. The RNC had to prove it hadn’t recently violated the consent decree in order to be freed from it, and risks ending up right back under another court order in the future if it should change course.

Additionally, the RNC wouldn’t need to get its hands dirty, even if it wanted to continue vote challenging en masse. State-level GOP organizations have been repeatedly accused of pursuing strategies of voter suppression on their own. In 2016, a North Carolina court stepped in to stop Republican challengers in three counties from using voter caging to cancel thousands of voters in disproportionately black precincts. That year also saw multiple lawsuits filed against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, for the cancellations of over 30,000 voter registrations for minor errors—64 percent of the canceled registrations came from black voters. More recently, as my colleague Brentin Mock reported, during Alabama’s special election for its open Senate seat in December, black voters alleged intimidation by police at the polls.

But with Donald Trump at the head of the national GOP apparatus, it’s too soon to rule anything out. Trump has been a fervent proponent of discredited claims of voter fraud, and of measures purported to counter that fraud. The official mission of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was to “study vulnerabilities in voting systems used for federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations, improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting”—leaving it ostensibly agnostic about the prevalence of fraud. But even in his statement disbanding the commission last week, Trump declined to adopt that neutral rhetoric, citing “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” and claiming that people who refused to cooperate with measures taken against that fraud had something to hide.