A part of this fascinating New Yorker piece:

The subject of voting rights has largely been thrust upon Obama by a conservative judiciary. “You look at something like the Voting Rights Act, which was uncontroversial from a legal point of view among both Republicans and Democrats ten, fifteen, twenty years ago,” Obama told me. “The ruling that struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act would have been considered a fairly radical step, but it’s a step that the Supreme Court took.” He was referring to the Shelby County decision, of 2013, which invalidated the portion of the law that required Justice Department review of electoral changes, mostly in Southern states.

In response, Obama offered a modulated criticism. As he put it, “The fact that the Supreme Court didn’t seem to internalize evidence where state election officials or politicians are pretty unabashed in saying we want to keep certain folks from voting, where you have voter-I.D. laws that clearly make it harder for certain folks to vote, despite the fact that there is no actual evidence of fraud—not just a little evidence of fraud but no evidence—as every mathematical assessment, statistical assessment that’s been done shows, it’s a pretext for wanting to shape the franchise for partisan advantage. The fact that that doesn’t seem to have gone into the Court’s reasoning I think makes it an ultimately flawed decision.”