Adam Liptak deep dive for the NYT:

For the fourth time since April, the Supreme Court this week made it harder for Americans to vote. The ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, was part of “a trend of condoning disfranchisement.”

The court’s rulings — in cases from Alabama, Florida, Texas and Wisconsin — provide a contrast to an image of the court that emerged at the end of the term that ended last week, one in which liberals achieved some significant victories. The recent run of election cases tell a different story.

“One might have thought that the crisis in voting created by the pandemic would have caused the justices to rise above their usual ideological and partisan divide on election questions,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “But there’s no sign of that on the horizon.”

The court’s voting-rights rulings were decided in haste, in reaction to emergency applications asking the justices to take quick action in pending appeals. The court did not hear arguments, and most of the orders it issued provided no reasoning. But the bottom line was uniform: The Supreme Court, which is dominated by five Republican appointees, sided with arguments pressed by Republicans to restrict voting rights in every case.