Editorial: Ulterior motive at work?

Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

Voter fraud! Republicans have been spreading that scare for five years. Now many states are passing laws requiring people to present photo IDs at their polling stations.

Indiana's law, passed two years ago, was upheld in a 2-1 vote by a panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to that ruling.

We hope the justices have been keeping up with all that has been written about the alleged voter fraud. Numerous articles have documented that fraud by individual voters is extremely rare. The New York Times, for example, published a lengthy story in April on the Justice Department's five-year crusade to root out all the alleged voter fraud.

The Times revealed that only 120 people were ever charged, and that in many of those cases, voters committed errors, not fraud.

So why have the Bush administration and state Republicans so aggressively pushed the notion of voter fraud?

Could they be targeting poor people, who tend to vote Democratic? It's not always cheap to obtain a photo ID, especially for those who have to track down and pay for copies of their birth certificates.

"The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not too thinly veiled attempt to discourage Election Day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic," the dissenting judge on the 7th Circuit panel wrote.

We agree.