When Maria Palmer was corralling votes in the closing weeks of her Chapel Hill, North Carolina, city council race last year, she found herself repeatedly running into a hurdle: Some of her most ardent backers weren’t registered to cast a ballot.

So Palmer took things into her own hands, leveraging the state’s same-day registration and early voting laws by personally shuttling Hispanic supporters from her community to the polls and helping them cast votes for her on the spot.

One man named William – a Colombian immigrant in his early 40s without a car whose last name was withheld – was eager to participate but was also pressed for time, with only two hours between his day shift as a custodian at a hospital and his night shift working in a nursing home cafeteria.

After scarfing down a Burger King drive-thru meal in Palmer’s passenger seat, William registered at his precinct and submitted his first vote as a U.S. citizen, one that would help Palmer become the highest ranking Hispanic elected official in North Carolina. But without her persistence and transportation, it’s unlikely William would have ever found the wherewithal to make it to the polls.

“There are a lot of people like him,” Palmer says. “It is not an easy thing.”

Palmer now worries a sweeping new state law that went into effect this year will make it less likely others in circumstances similar to William will ever get a chance to participate in an election. That’s why she’s joined a lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction this week against a slate of provisions in a sweeping piece of Republican-drafted legislation that the president of the state’s NAACP has dubbed “the worst voter suppression law since the days of Jim Crow.”

While much of the public attention has concentrated on the photo ID requirement in the law, that won’t take effect until the 2016 election cycle. It’s the other parts already in place that may have the most immediate impact on the November 2014 midterm – the shortening of early voting by seven days, the elimination of same-day registration, the scrapping of a preregistration program for 16- and 17-year-olds and the automatic disqualification of any ballot cast outside one’s assigned precinct.

“It’s going to be a lot more difficult for Hispanics to vote,” Palmer says. “Voter ID only matters if you’ve cleared the other hurdles, so voter ID, in a sense, is a smaller issue right now. If you can’t register, it just doesn’t matter.”

The plaintiffs central argument is that much of the law – HB 589 – disproportionately discriminates against minorities and the downtrodden, erecting new burdens for those groups to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

“This is a full assault on the franchise of voting,” said William Barber, president of the state’s NAACP chapter on a conference call previewing the court fight.

As similar battles fester around the country, the outcome of the North Carolina case could reverberate nationally and set a precedent for how restrictive voting laws can be designed without causing irreparable harm. Republicans argue the tighter standards lower costs, prevent fraud and are equally applied to every voting bloc. Democrats counter that the hidden intention is to suppress the vote of those most likely to support their candidates.

In the closely contested U.S. Senate race, Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., has blasted her GOP opponent, House Speaker Thom Tillis, for ushering through the law using voter fraud as a “red herring.” An aide to Hagan says part of the campaign’s turnout operation will be an effort to make sure voters aren’t surprised by the changes.

Tillis’ camp counters that the new law didn’t depress turnout in the state’s May primary. In fact, an additional 148,000 people showed up to vote compared to 2010.

Though it’s impossible to empirically measure the impact of each provision of the law, there is some early data that demonstrates opponents’ fears may be overblown, at least in the short-term.

In the May 2014 primary with all the new restrictions but voter ID in place, African-American turnout as a total percentage of all votes cast was actually 1.5 percent higher than in 2010, according to statistics provided by North Carolina's nonpartisan State Board of Elections. It was white turnout that actually dropped 3 percent since the last midterm primary. There aren’t any reliable statistics available on the difference among Hispanics because the state considers Hispanic and Latino an ethnicity and not a race and therefore doesn’t categorize it.

“It didn’t affect turnout as a baseline number. Overall, it was better for African-Americans, says Josh Lawson, a spokesman for the board.

What's more, just 3 percent of African-American voters utilized same day registration to vote during the 2012 general election, compared to 1.6 percent of white voters – a minuscule difference.

“We hope the court bases its decision on available data. We can do better than abstract hypotheticals," Lawson says.

Yet opponents of the law argue the results of one midterm primary in which less than 16 percent of the electorate participated is not a fair metric to apply to the merits of the case.

Holding up the primary results, the plaintiffs write in court documents, is “an argument akin to a claim that road construction will not cause traffic problems during rush hour because it did not cause such problems at night.”

Minority participation unquestionably spiked in 2008 and 2012, but that likely had to do with a certain presidential candidate.

The plaintiffs explanation largely ignores the historic nature of President Barack Obama’s campaign that generated massive – and unprecedented – enthusiasm among African-Americans.

Furthermore, Virginia and Mississippi – two states that don’t allow same-day registration, out of precinct balloting and require a photo ID – have boasted African-American turnout that is equal to or higher than North Carolina’s over the past decade.

“In effect what plaintiffs seek is an order from this court requiring that the state should be forced to adopt election practices that maximize the political influence of minority voters,” wrote Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat, in a court document defending the law.

However, their defense in eliminating a preregistration program for teenagers appears a bit more flimsy. Essentially they argue they can get rid of it, because a majority of other states don’t have it. In a moment of candor during the debate on the bill, one GOP senator actually groused that college students, “don’t pay squat in taxes,” and “skew the results of elections in local areas.” The comment provided fuel to Democrats who see the entire law as an underhanded Republican tactic to achieve an electoral advantage.

Unless HB 589 is halted – a decision that could come as early next week – Palmer fears that many minorities will struggle to register by the October 10 deadline in order to cast a November ballot.

Finding the time to navigate the registration process at the state Department of Motor Vehicles or Board of Elections when juggling two jobs and a family can be more arduous than it seems.

“It may be true that the rules apply to everybody, but poorer people, which usually applies to immigrants, have the least flexible jobs and the most hours to work,” Palmer says. “People don’t want to take risks. More and more, right now, voting is seen as a risk.”

Ironically, if the restrictions stay in place for the fall, the November results will provide the freshest and most instructive evidence as to whether HB 589 stifles minority turnout.

But as with polling, the variables determining who turns out to vote, and why, are numerous and often unexplainable.