In a heated election year, federal and state courts are rejecting Republican-backed voting restrictions after finding their sole purpose is to limit voting by African-Americans, Latinos, the poor and other minority groups that lean Democratic.

In rulings last Friday that could pave the way for bigger turnouts on Election Day, courts struck down such laws in the key election states of North Carolina, Kansas and Wisconsin.

Marc Elias, an attorney whose law firm challenged voting restrictions in several states, including Wisconsin and North Carolina, said the recent rulings are steps in correcting “voting restriction laws put in place by Republican legislators.”

There’s been a concerted effort by Republicans nationwide since President Obama was first elected in 2008 to turn back voting rights and laws improving access to the polls that had been in place since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, he said.

The decisions follow a similar blow to a Texas law that critics said was one of the nation’s most restrictive. On July 20, the conservative New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found Texas’ voter ID law discriminatory and ordered it changed before the November election to ensure it does not serve as a barrier to people trying to cast ballots.

The biggest victory for voting rights advocates may have come in the North Carolina case that knocked down another far-reaching effort to block people from voting.

A federal appeals court based in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, struck down a 2013 law that the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature imposed after finding the law “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The unanimous decision from a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision in a major victory for the Obama administration, the NAACP, the ACLU and other supporters of voting rights.

Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote the appellate decision that bars North Carolina from employing any of the restrictions the law put in place. The court found that the “legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise” in the state’s modern history.

Judge Motz wrote that the backers of the omnibus law imposed “cures for problems that did not exist” in agreeing with challengers that there was no evidence to support the main justification — that the law blocked voter fraud.

With the November election less than 100 days away, the court’s decision blocks the state from requiring IDs at the polls, from limiting early voting and from barring same-day voter registration.

“If North Carolina and Texas could get away with these voting restrictions, it would have been a green light for other states to do so,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine.

He noted that the U.S. Justice Department brought both the North Carolina and Texas cases, the most important since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key voting protection element in the federal Voting Rights Act in 2013. That decision cleared the way for the current spate of Republican efforts to limit voting.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, and other GOP leaders issued a heated statement denouncing the appellate court’s ruling “by three partisan Democrats” and vowed a quick appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We can only wonder if the intent is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton to steal the election,” said North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore.

Most experts believe the decision will have little impact on Virginia. While the Republican-dominated Virginia General Assembly passed new laws requiring photo IDs to vote, the state law also allowed a wider array of ID types than North Carolina has and also offers free photo IDs to registered voters who do not have them.

In the Kansas ruling, a county judge directed that the state count the votes in local and state elections of people who did not provide proof of U.S. citizenship when they registered to vote.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a national leader in Republican voter-restriction efforts, had pushed through a rule that would have set those votes aside, perhaps impacting up to 50,000 people.

Mr. Kobach said the decision would allow people living in the U.S. illegally to vote, although voting rights advocates argued in court that he could produce no evidence that non-citizens had voted.

In Wisconsin, a federal judge threw out a host of election laws, while allowing the state’s voter ID law to remain in place with substantial limitations.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson ordered the state to quickly issue credentials valid for voting to anyone trying to obtain a free photo ID but lacking underlying documents such as birth certificates.

He also struck down restrictions on absentee and early voting, writing that the restrictions discriminated against African-Americans in Milwaukee who reliably vote Democratic.

In addition, he struck down laws that increased residency requirements for people seeking to register from 10 to 28 days, that prohibited use of expired but otherwise qualifying student IDs to vote and that barred distribution of absentee ballots by fax or email.

“The evidence in this case casts doubt on the notion that voter ID laws foster integrity and confidence,” Judge Peterson wrote. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.”

The state plans to appeal, and it is unclear yet whether the judge’s decision would be put on hold for the November election.