The recent gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will injure American democracy in ways that go far beyond the outcome of this year’s midterm elections. And the damage will be felt in New York, where decades of discrimination and political trickery has long placed three of the five boroughs — Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx — under the same federal scrutiny of election practices as notorious states like Mississippi and Louisiana.

“The Voting Rights Act is arguably, in terms of our politics, the most important law Congress has ever passed, and the court has really made it pretty toothless,” Professor Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School told me. “The first moves that we should expect are the dismantling of majority-minority districts that had been built because of compliance with the Voting Rights Act. Some of that’s already happened, for example in Florida, and we can look forward to it happening probably in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi. Since that compliance is no longer necessary, those districts are very likely to be dismantled by Republican legislatures in southern states.”

Until now, the VRA required state legislatures, mostly in the South, to comply with a broad “totality of circumstances” test —  subject to review by the U.S. Department of Justice —  to ensure that state officials were not diluting the voting power of racial minorities. The law banned state legislatures and local boards of election from using literacy tests, poll taxes, burdensome registration requirements, and other forms of vote suppression. It also outlawed the practice of carving up Black communities into multiple, mostly white districts to minimize Black voting power, a practice called “cracking.”

But in Louisiana v. Callais, a majority of the Supreme Court explicitly eliminated........

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