“In North Carolina, restriction of voting mechanisms and procedures that most heavily affect African Americans will predictably redound to the benefit of one political party and to the disadvantage of the other,” Motz wrote. “As the evidence in the record makes clear, that is what happened here.”

A range of plaintiffs, including the North Carolina NAACP, the Advancement Project, and the Department of Justice quickly sued the state over the law. In April, federal district-court Judge Thomas Schroeder upheld the law, finding that plaintiffs had “failed to show that such disparities will have materially adverse effects on the ability of minority voters to cast a ballot and effectively exercise the electoral franchise.”

Echoing Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County, Schroeder stated that while the Old North State had a shameful history of racial discrimination, it was just that—history. “There is significant, shameful past discrimination. In North Carolina's recent history, however, certainly for the last quarter century, there is little official discrimination to consider,” he wrote.

The circuit court rebuked Schroeder, saying that the district court had “fundamentally erred” and “seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees.” For example, Friday’s decision noted, black participation in elections had been rising steadily in the year before the law passed, periodically bolstered by federal intervention. “Not coincidentally, during this period North Carolina emerged as a swing state in national elections,” Motz drily noted. She also wrote:

The General Assembly enacted [these changes] in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting. The district court clearly erred in ignoring or dismissing this historical background evidence, all of which supports a finding of discriminatory intent.

In 2008, Barack Obama narrowly won North Carolina in the presidential election. But in 2010, Republicans captured both houses of the legislature, and two years later McCrory defeated Lieutenant Governor Walter Dalton, as Mitt Romney edged Obama. The GOP undertook a program of conservative reforms, overturning a tradition of bipartisan moderation in the state. Among those changes was the voting law. While a bill had been under consideration, the Shelby County decision led state Senator Tom Apodaca to comment, “Now we can go with the full bill.” Though commonly referred to as a voter-ID law, similar to those passed or considered in other states, many advocates saw the other provisions as equally or more important.

In the end, it was Schroeder’s lengthy work on the case—a nearly 500-page opinion, plus 25,000 pages of record—that seemed decisive in the circuit-court decision. The panel of judges ruled that there was so much information in the record that they did not need to remand the case to the district court, and could determine that Schroeder made an erroneous factual finding on their own.