Eight years ago on Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts blew up the U.S.s hard-won voting rights protections.

Roberts issued the ruling for a five-vote Supreme Court majority in the Shelby County v. Holder case stating that the preclearance formula enacted in the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 which required certain states to get federal approval for voting changes was no longer applicable. He reasoned the policy had been so successful at curbing discriminatory election practices that it was no longer justified.

He was wrong. The justices decision reverberates today as Republican-run states freed from the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act and inspired by ex-President Donald Trump s stolen election myth enact increasingly bold new laws that make it harder for disproportionately Democratic communities to vote and easier for partisan Republicans to subvert elections by purging local elections officials and overturning results they dont like.

Shelby is the unfortunate precursor of all of these trash anti-voting, anti-democracy bills that we see proliferating in 47 of our 50 states right now, said Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, a voter mobilization group based in Georgia.

The Voting Rights Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation in U.S. history, passed in the immediate wake of the racist violence of state and private actors against civil rights protesters. Activists marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to make real the 14th Amendments right to due process and the 15th Amendments prohibition on election discrimination based on race. This was when Alabama state troopers broke the skull of a young John Lewis who would go on to serve as a Democratic congressman for Georgia for 33 years until his death in 2020 as they beat marchers trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Voting rights activists Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo were murdered in separate incidents.

The Voting Rights Acts preclearance authority required certain jurisdictions with a pattern and history of enacting discriminatory election practices to submit changes to election laws, rules and practices for review by the Department of Justice ahead of time.

The Supreme Court upheld the preclearance authority four times, in 1966, 1973, 1980 and 1999. But the appointments of justices Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005 gave the court a five-vote conservative majority hostile to federal voting rights laws. When Congress renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006, it did not update the preclearance formula, leaving an opening for opponents to argue it was out of date and no longer reflected voting on the ground.

Thats what Roberts wrote in his Shelby County v. Holder ruling.