News & Observer on a third election-related ruling coming out of the North Carolina Supreme Court today:

Thousands of formerly incarcerated North Carolina residents serving felony sentences will no longer be able to vote.

A trial court ruling had made them eligible to vote in the midterm elections last November, but on Friday the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned that order.

The State Board of Elections said later Friday it has updated voter registration applications to comply. Now, once again, people serving a felony sentence cannot register or vote until their sentence ends, including any period of probation, parole or post-release supervision.

Elections officials will use lists of people serving felony sentences to cancel registrations of people who are now ineligible, the board said.

Arguments in the case, known as Community Success Initiative v. Moore, centered on whether the state law that delineates how people’s voting rights are restored is constitutional and whether it had discriminatory intent.

The high court reversed the trial ruling Friday 5 to 2, split along partisan lines, with Republican justices in favor of reversal and Democrats against.

For the majority, Justice Trey Allen wrote that it is “not unconstitutional to insist that felons pay their debt to society as a condition of participating in the electoral process.”

“The General Assembly did not engage in racial discrimination or otherwise violate the North Carolina Constitution by requiring individuals with felony convictions to complete their sentences — including probation, parole, or post-release supervision — before they regain the right to vote,” Allen wrote.

Republicans flipped control of the court in the November elections, flipping two Democratic-held seats and giving their party back a majority on the state’s high court. Allen was one of the newly elected justices.

Writing in the dissent, Justice Anita Earls said Friday’s ruling “will one day be repudiated on two grounds. First, because it seeks to justify the denial of a basic human right to citizens and thereby perpetuates a vestige of slavery, and second, because the majority violates a basic tenant of appellate review by ignoring the facts as found by the trial court and substituting its own.” Justice Michael Morgan joined in the dissent.