Jedidiah Purdy for the New Yorker. It offers a darker response to my “tide is turning” NYT piece:

Other recent cases have also pressed back against the partisan and racial effects of Republican legislatures’ election laws. Most significantly, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a strict voter-identification law in Texas violated the Voting Rights Act. Federal courts have also invalidated early-voting rollbacks and strict voter-identification laws in Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Ohio. Still, it is too early to say that the tide has turned against these laws. The Fifth Circuit was divided over the Texas law, and appeals will hold most of the decisions open to reversal. Even the North Carolina decision, shaped in response to a vividly egregious situation, is not a template for dealing with voting restrictions that are passed more decorously, outside the South, or simply by legislatures that avoid announcing their interest in the racial effects of their lawmaking.

In fact, the North Carolina ruling could conceivably be used to strike down legislation that encourages a minority group’s turnout. When the layers of context are stripped away, its principle is that a legislature violates the Constitution when it develops a voting scheme to burden a racial group’s relative ballot access, even if race is simply a proxy for voting preferences. In today’s legal and political climate, this is not necessarily a liberal principle. Decades of conservative Supreme Court jurisprudence have made the law of racial equality just as concerned with burdens on whites as with those on minorities. In recent decades, most Supreme Court decisions on racial equality have addressed challenges to affirmative-action programs, and the decisions (with the notable exception of this spring’s ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas) have been quite solicitous of white plaintiffs. A future Democratic North Carolina legislature that expands early voting and authorizes out-of-precinct voting might find itself in an ideological mirror image of Judge Motz’s opinion, rebuked for selectively providing voting procedures that black voters use more often.