The Supreme Court’s current term may have started with a whimper, but it will end with a bang. In recent weeks, the justices added three cases related to electoral power and influence in the United States. One involves the Trump administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census; the other two will give the justices another opportunity to weigh the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering.

Taken together, the rulings could have a dramatic effect on the shape and quality of American democracy for the next decade.

Allowing the citizenship question on the census would undermine the survey’s accuracy, compromising a decade’s worth of legislative maps and tilting the playing field toward whiter and more rural communities at the expense of everyone else. And thwarting legal challenges to warped congressional districts would deny Americans a means of remedying another tool of political disempowerment. The Roberts Court may ultimately rule in ways that improve equal representation in America, but its track record gives little comfort that it will.

Last week, the court announced it would hear Department of Commerce v. New York, the dispute over Trump’s proposed citizenship question. The main purpose of the census is to count every living person within the United States—citizen and non-citizen alike—and thus ensure that each state has the appropriate number of members in the House of Representatives. But the data collected on gender, age, race, income, and more has a nearly endless set of other uses. State legislators use it to redraw their own legislative maps. Congress allocates hundreds of billions of dollars in federal domestic programs to the states based on their total population. Businesses use the data to determine where they should expand and how to cater to different communities. It fundamentally shapes how Americans engage with their civic institutions, and how those institutions engage with them.

Adding a citizenship question is less innocuous than it may seem. A recent PRRI/The Atlantic survey found that 76 percent of Americans, including 81 percent of Republicans, believe the question will make the census inaccurate. Many experts, including the Census Bureau’s career staff, fear that the question would measurably reduce participation among Hispanics and immigrants, and thus cause them to be underrepresented in the final data. The Trump administration’s aggressive policies toward those communities has already made members of those communities reluctant to identify themselves to the government for other purposes. The shadow of history also looms large: Federal agents secretly used census data to locate and detain Japanese American families during World War II.