At least 17 million people were removed from the voter rolls between the 2016 election and the 2018 midterms, according to a new report published by the Brennan Center for Justice this week.

The study updated an in-depth 2018 analysis on voter purges and offered further evidence that certain places continued to more aggressively remove people from the voting rolls following the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.

In that decision, the Supreme Court essentially gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination at the polls to clear their voting changes with the federal government before those changes went into effect.

The number of voters removed from the rolls between 2016 and 2018 was similar to the number removed between 2014 and 2016, researchers found. But between 2006 and 2008, prior to the Supreme Court decision, roughly 4 million fewer voters were removed from the rolls.

The Brennan Center researchers also found that jurisdictions previously subject to Section 5 removed voters from the rolls at a median rate of 40% higher than other jurisdictions. If those places had removed voters at the same rate as other places, about 1.1 million fewer people would have been removed from the rolls.

The Supreme Court argued in 2013 that racial discrimination in those areas had abated and that the Voting Rights Act formula was therefore outdated, but the higher removal rate suggests past discrimination still has a “stickiness” in those jurisdictions, said Myrna Pérez, director of voting rights and elections programs at the Brennan Center.

“There is something to their shared history that made sense for them to be covered back then that is still durable, that still exists,” Pérez said in an interview. “It’s not random, it’s not haphazard. It’s not happenstance. There’s something to their history and their institutional and structural barriers that [they] still have that today.”