Richard Hasen

It's an issue where the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, and now the Voting Rights Act itself is potentially going to be either struck down or

Or, I think much more likely, Section 2 is going to be reinterpreted to be toothless.

It will still be a law on the books, but it will be almost impossible for minority voters to be able to elect their candidates of choice through Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

I think this would be a terrible setback for American democracy.

It would mean that not just Congress, but our state legislatures, our city councils, our county boards, our school districts would be much wider, much more homogeneous.

We would have much less representation.

And when it comes to Congress,

where there's concern that Republican states might redraw congressional districts to get rid of these districts that have been required by Section 2 and create more white Republican districts, I think there will also be pressure in Democratic states to eliminate these districts, spread out those reliable Democratic voters into more districts to create more Democratic districts that will also elect the first choice of white voters rather than the vote choices of candidates of color.

And so while the partisan implications are not completely clear and might benefit Republicans to some extent, it's going to be a real loss for fair representation in the United States.

Well, let's talk about the fact that the U.S.

Constitution does not guarantee anyone the right to vote.

It simply says that if you're going to hold an election, you can't discriminate on the basis of race or gender or age between 18 and 21.

We don't have an affirmative right to vote like most other modern constitutions have.

Instead, the Constitution says you only have the right to vote in the House.

And the qualifications to vote are those set by states.

So there's no federal constitutional guarantee of anyone to be able to vote.

And if we go back to the 2000 election, to Bush versus Gore, the case in the Supreme Court that ended the dispute over who got Florida's electoral college votes.

In that case, the Supreme Court said that state legislatures get to choose the manner for choosing presidential electors.

And even though states have given that ability to vote to voters, to vote for president, states could take it back in future elections and have state legislatures directly appoint electors.

So all of this is to say that we don't have strong voting rights protections like most other advanced democracies do.