Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that while North Carolina had been on the progressive end of the spectrum of voting, the new rules were simply retrenchment and were constitutional. He said the plaintiff—a group that included the North Carolina NAACP, the Justice Department, and others—“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.”

Schroeder’s decision to uphold the law was not unexpected. The plaintiffs have already vowed to appeal the decision to a federal appeals court.

The trial was held in two phases. The first, which began last July, focused on the early voting, out-of-precinct voting, and same-day registration portions. Because of last-minute changes to the voter-ID section of the law—legislators created a process by which voters could cast a ballot by swearing they had a “reasonable impediment” to getting a photo ID—a trial about the ID requirement was not held until January. Schroeder upheld both halves of the law in his ruling.

The voting law was passed shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states and jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to receive “pre-clearance” from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws. While Republicans had been considering changes already, the ruling allowed them to expand their ambition. “Now we can go with the full bill,” Senator Tom Apodaca, chairman of the rules committee, said at the time.

With the Voting Rights Act in the background, the fight over HB 589 became a referendum on the past, and whether the new rules were—as the plaintiffs charged—a revival of Jim Crow rules like literacy tests, intended to weed out black voters.

“This is our Selma,” said the Reverend William Barber II, the head of the state NAACP and an organizer of “Moral Mondays,” a series of huge demonstrations in Raleigh and elsewhere that have gone on since Republicans took control of the state and began passing a series of very conservative reforms.

The defendants disagreed. “The history of North Carolina is not on trial here,” a lawyer for Governor Pat McCrory said at the trial.

In the end, Schroeder sided with the defendants. “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.

Once the central story in the Old North State’s political battle—the state has become hyperpolarized in the years since Republicans won control of the General Assembly in 2010 and the governorship in 2012—the voting-rights story has been pushed to the side more recently by the even-hotter controversy over HB2, the recently enacted law that bans transgender bathroom accommodation in state facilities and preempts city rules on transgender accommodations, LGBT non-discrimination, and living wages. In the hours before Schroeder’s ruling was revealed on Monday, Moral Monday protestors were demonstrating in the streets of Raleigh against HB2.