With just under four months before the midterm elections, a wave of court rulings, lawsuits and new laws is reshaping how elections are run in the U.S. In its spring session, the Supreme Court significantly narrowed the Voting Rights Act.

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important civil rights law of the 1960s, has no teeth left. And that’s just the beginning of what they’ve done in terms of weakening democracy,” journalist Ari Berman says.

Berman is a voting-rights expert for the progressive publication Mother Jones. He notes that more recently, the court preserved mail-in voting by a single vote, then struck down decades-old limits on how much political parties can spend on candidates. Meanwhile, President Trump is pushing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require showing a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, and create strict ID requirements to cast a ballot.

“Half of all Americans don’t have passports. So already there, you’re talking about half the country can’t comply,” Berman says. “Ask the average person, ‘Do you know where your birth certificate is?’ And a lot of people are gonna struggle to find it.”

Berman describes the president as “obsessed with the mechanics of voting” — “Every time he feels like his party is losing, he tries to mess with the mechanics of the voting in one way or another, either trying to overturn the election or getting his party to gerrymander ahead of time to protect their vulnerable majority or whatever it might be,” he says.

Berman sees President Trump’s promotion of the SAVE America Act as part of a larger plan to sow distrust in the system and possibly challenge the results of the midterms: “If Republicans lose, he’s going to say, ‘Well, we didn’t have the SAVE Act, therefore the election was rigged.’ … He is creating the predicate for some kind of dramatic intervention to either challenge how people vote, how their votes are counted, or how the elections are ultimately certified,” Berman says. “That’s probably the thing that’s keeping me and other experts on voting up at night is, what steps could this administration take to try to interfere in the voting process that we’ve never seen another administration or history take before?”