On Tuesday, the Supreme Court once again took up the issue of partisan gerrymandering, hearing two cases that could allow the justices to put an end to the practice of drawing legislative maps for no other reason than to give an electoral edge to the party doing the drawing. Or as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has described it, “the drawing of legislative district lines to subordinate adherents of one political party and entrench a rival party in power.”

Voting rights advocates fear that an emboldened conservative majority on the court may not be open to policing politically motivated gerrymandering, in turn barring federal judges from considering future lawsuits.

One of the cases before the Supreme Court this week comes from North Carolina, where Republicans won barely 50 percent of the vote in the 2018 midterms but took nine of 13 congressional seats. ( That count does not include the Ninth Congressional District, which remains contested as a result of rampant election fraud.) In a lengthy ruling addressing these disparities, which arose from a map drawn in 2016, a panel of federal judges in August said that the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly violated the Constitution by drawing districts to give Republicans a partisan advantage.

The other case is from Maryland, where a different panel of judges ruled that the Sixth Congressional District was unconstitutionally drawn because Democrats “specifically targeted voters … who were registered as Republicans and who had historically voted for Republican candidates.” The judges found that Republican voters’ rights were violated because the gerrymander effectively moved about 30 percent of them out of the district, which for nearly two decades had been represented by a Republican congressman, and replaced them with Democratic voters.