In the final days of New York’s legislative session this June, the Let New York Vote coalition asked Albany to pass a package of six voting rights bills before lawmakers went home. Sawi, the coalition’s coordinator, wrote in the New York Daily News on June 4 that voting protections “once thought settled are increasingly vulnerable.”

The coalition cited Louisiana v. Callais, in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed continued legal challenges to majority-Black congressional districts despite protections under the federal Voting Rights Act. The coalition argued that safeguards New Yorkers assumed were permanent are back in play, and Albany should shore up its own before the session closed.

New York already has one of the strongest state-level voting laws in the country in the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York. The coalition argued that a strong law is not a finished one, and that protections have to be “continuously defended, modernized, and strengthened as new challenges emerge.”