A federal appeals court has struck down voting restrictions in North Carolina, saying they “disproportionately affected African Americans.” In the ruling, the three-judge panel from the Fourth Circuit Court wrote, “The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The law had been challenged by the Justice Department, the North Carolina NAACP and other civil rights groups after its passage in 2013 limited the forms of ID acceptable at polling places and restricted how people could register. As a result, about 5 percent of the state’s registered voters, primarily African Americans, would have been excluded from being able to cast a ballot. This is Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, speaking on Democracy Now! about how the rules affected North Carolina’s presidential primaries earlier this year.

Bob Hall: “You could see that with same-day registration we had over 8,000 voters able to vote, able to use same-day registration. That is, they were not registered, but they showed up during early voting, and they were able to use that provision to vote. It’s disproportionately African-American, disproportionately young people. They want to get rid of that.”