The Voting Rights Advancement Act is written to “restore and bolster the Voting Rights Act, and undo the damage done by the Shelby County decision,” Sewell said in a press release. In that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts invalidated the Voting Rights Act’s “coverage formula,” a list of jurisdictions that had to seek federal preclearance for any changes to elections laws. In Roberts’s reckoning, racism in the country had been pared back, and continuing to require special scrutiny of those jurisdictions—despite the numerous laws they proposed over the years that failed preclearance tests and resulted in litigation—was unconstitutional.

Since then, voting-rights advocates and several Democrats argue that the country has been mired in a new—and predictable—age of accelerated voter suppression and restrictive voting laws. “We’ve just seen since Shelby an onslaught of more restrictive voting laws,” Sewell told me a few weeks ago in her office.

She often speaks on the voter-ID laws in her home state. They have grown tighter over time in ways that seem to uniquely disadvantage elderly black voters, who may not have or need a driver’s license, and who, having grown up in the rural Jim Crow South, may not have ever had the official documentation to get some strict forms of ID. Sewell cites her own father, who died in 2017 and had a series of strokes that left him wheelchair-bound near the end of his life. “He didn’t have a driver’s license but he had been voting—until Alabama changed its law in 2014—with a validly issued federal ID called a Social Security card,” she told me.

Alabama is one of several states that have rapidly created more restrictive voting laws post–Shelby County, and also where gerrymandering, voter purges, and zealous campaigns against the specter of noncitizen voting by a wave of pro-Trump state attorneys general and secretaries of state have dominated the political process. In North Carolina, GOP legislators have fought to maintain power with gerrymandered maps, enacted a voter-ID and elections-law package that one federal court said discriminated against black people “with almost surgical precision,” and have leveraged just about every antidemocratic measure to maintain power. The past few months in North Carolina have culminated in a so-called legislative coup by the GOP, aimed at disempowering a newly elected Democratic governor. The State Board of Elections decided last week to redo the congressional race in the Ninth District in light of evidence that election fraud on behalf of the Republican candidate Mark Harris influenced the result.

Not to be outdone, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp won his election against Democrat Stacey Abrams after a mass campaign of voter suppression, including hundreds of thousands of voter purges that disproportionately affected people of color—in an election that he administered as secretary of state. In Texas, gerrymandering, voter-ID laws, and court rulings have been at the center of politics for years, and almost got the state placed back under federal preclearance. A North Dakota voter-ID law in place in 2018 seemed to specifically target the state’s Native American population. Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an architect of the post–Shelby County Republican elections-law strategy, lost his bid for governor after facing allegations of voter suppression. And places like Maricopa County, Arizona, have seen purges and Election Day lines over the years that have disproportionately affected Latinos and other minorities at incredibly high rates.