New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Courton Wednesday issued a brief, unsigned order reinstating provisions of a North Carolina voting law that bar same-day registration and counting votes cast in the wrong precinct. A federal appeals court had blocked the provisions, saying they disproportionately harmed black voters.

In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said she would have sustained the appeals court’s determination that the two provisions “risked significantly reducing opportunities for black voters to exercise the franchise.”

The case arose from a law enacted by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court decision that effectively eliminated a central provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, its Section 5.

The federal government and various groups and individuals sued, saying several restrictions in the state law violated the Constitution and what remained of the Voting Rights Act. A trial judge declined to block the law, but a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., ruled last week that the restrictions on same-day registration and counting out-of-precinct votes should be suspended.

The appeals court let stand parts of the law that imposed new voter identification requirements, cut off a week of early voting, kept polling places closed on the Saturday before the election and disallowed preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds in high schools. Justice Ginsburg said all of those measures “likely would not have survived” scrutiny under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

In urging the Supreme Court to intervene, North Carolina officials said the appeals court’s order was “extremely burdensome” and “represents a massive and unprecedented last-minute change in the election practices which North Carolina implemented in the May 2014 primary and which North Carolina has been preparing to implement in the 2014 general election.”

Groups challenging the law urged the justices to let the appeals court’s ruling stand. The state law, they said, had “surgically eliminated the precise forms of registration and voting that had enabled significant expansion of African-Americans’ civic participation in North Carolina over the previous decade.”

The Supreme Court is likely to act soon on a separate application concerning a Wisconsin voter identification law. Recent changes to such laws were the subject of a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office, which suggested that they were responsible for decreased turnout at the polls in some states in 2012.

The G.A.O., which is the investigative arm of Congress, made its findings public in a 206-page report that included an analysis of turnout statistics from six states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Kansas, Maine and Tennessee.

Each of those states posted lower rates of voter turnout in 2012 than in 2008, but the decreases were especially pronounced in Kansas and Tennessee, the states included in the study that had altered identification requirements between the elections. The G.A.O. said the steeper declines in Kansas and Tennessee might be “attributable to changes in those two states’ voter ID requirements,” and it noted that turnout had especially decreased among young and African-American voters.

The G.A.O. did not reach any landmark conclusions about whether voter identification laws help prevent election fraud. The report’s authors said the “challenges” of measuring the prevalence of misconduct “make any analysis of the effect of voter ID laws in preventing in-person voter fraud difficult.”

Before the report’s publication, officials from Kansas and Tennessee wrote to the G.A.O. to express misgivings about its methodology, which the Kansas secretary of state, Kris W. Kobach, criticized as “fatally flawed.”

Two Tennessee elections regulators accused the G.A.O. on Aug. 29 of constructing a study using “data from a biased political agent” and said other states in the analysis had compelling issues and candidates that accounted for higher turnout.

In an interview, Mr. Kobach said: “Nonpartisan does not mean competent. Sure, they are nonpartisan, but sometimes, they screw up.”

But opponents of the voter identification laws immediately portrayed the G.A.O. report, which five United States senators had requested, as evidence that such measures, often crafted by Republicans, are improper.

“This study confirms the real impact of Republican efforts to limit access to the ballot box,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in a statement.