Two weeks after Election Day, voting rights advocates are taking stock of the issues that plagued the 2016 election cycle—barriers to registering to vote, access to the ballot box, confusing new laws and court cases—and looking ahead to the battles to come.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump's pick for attorney general, has a troubling record when it comes to voting rights, only adding to the post-election worries among voting rights supporters.

"As bad as it was after Shelby and in this election, at least we had a Civil Rights Division which took these concerns somewhat seriously,” said Scott Simpson, the director of media and campaigns for the The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "And we don’t know what we’re going to get under Sessions. But we can look at his record, and his record bodes very poorly for the future of voting rights in this country.”

"Shelby” is Shelby County v. Holder, the June 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a key provision of 1965 Voting Rights Act used to determine which voting jurisdictions would have to pre-clear any changes to voting procedures or laws with the US Department of Justice or a federal court. Without it, nine states and parts of six others with a history of racial discrimination related to voting were allowed to make changes as they saw fit. "The election, at least for communities of color, started in June 2013,” Simpson says. "The Shelby decision is when this election began for people of color.”

In all, 14 states had new voting laws on the books for the first time in a presidential election, ranging from strict voter ID to curtailed early voting locations, according to the Brennan Center. The impact of those new laws on the outcome of the election is unclear, but Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, says that the problems they created for voters is obvious to anybody paying attention.

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