A Republican attack on a core provision of the Voting Rights Act that's designed to protect racial minorities comes to the Supreme Court this week, more than a decade after the justices knocked out another pillar of the 60-year-old law.

WASHINGTON – Republicans are keeping their legal options open to challenge absentee ballots in Pennsylvania, if the battleground state could swing President Donald Trump's reelection. The GOP already has laid the groundwork at the Supreme Court for an effort to exclude ballots that arrive after polls close Tuesday. The majority of the state’s mail-in and absentee ballots are being cast by Democrats. Around 400,000 absentee ballots from Clark County have been returned and accepted as valid, according to state election data. Mailed ballots that don’t come inside a secrecy envelope have to be discarded, under a state Supreme Court ruling.

Democratic and Republican lawyers already have gone to court over these issues in the run-up to Tuesday's election. A Pennsylvania case at the Supreme Court pits Donald Verrilli, who was President Barack Obama's top Supreme Court lawyer, against John Gore, a onetime high-ranking Trump Justice Department official. Mailed ballots that don’t come inside a secrecy envelope have to be discarded, under a state Supreme Court ruling. The Supreme Court left that order in place in response to a Republican effort to block it. “This is a horrible thing that the United States Supreme Court has done to our country," Trump said in Pennsylvania Saturday.