Fraud Alert.(The Talk of the Town)(electoral fraud)

Explicit racism has disappeared from mainstream political discourse in the United States. Jesse Helms made his long career in Washington by muttering about "bloc votes," but he's been gone from the Senate since 2003, and he has no similarly outspoken successors. Lest anyone think that racial discrimination itself has been banished from politics, however, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case that will be heard this week by the Supreme Court, provides a disturbing reminder.

One of the lesser outrages of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was the banal assertion that "after the current counting, it is likely legislative bodies nationwide will examine ways to improve the mechanisms and machinery for voting." In fact, the chief "improvement" that has come from the legislatures since 2000 is voter-I.D. laws, like the one that gives rise to this week's case. In 2005, Indiana began requiring voters to present government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. (Georgia passed a nearly identical law at about the same time, and several other states have tightened voter-I.D. requirements.) These laws, their sponsors assured the electorate (and now the courts), were passed to correct the problem of voter fraud. As the state of Indiana says in its brief to the Justices, the new rule "establishes reasonable, long-overdue election-security reform in a State highly vulnerable to in-person election fraud."

Actually, it is this purported justification that is the real fraud. The latest and most extensive examination of electoral irregularities, released in November by the nonpartisan research institute Demos, determined that voter fraud was "very rare," and every other respectable study has reached the same conclusion. This is certainly true in Indiana, where legislators said they were aiming to stop "voter impersonation," which was already a crime in the state; in the entire history of Indiana, the number of prosecutions for this offense has been zero. Nationwide, despite an attempt by the Bush Justice Department to crack down on voter fraud, there were only a hundred and twenty federal prosecutions and eighty-six convictions between 2002 and 2006--a period in which close to four hundred million votes were cast.

"Let's not beat around the bush," Terence T. Evans, the dissenting Court of Appeals judge in the Indiana case, slyly wrote. "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." He's not the only one to notice: the three federal judges who approved the Indiana law were appointed by a Republican President; the lone dissenter was appointed by a Democrat. It was also Republican-dominated legislatures that produced the Indiana and Georgia laws, both of which were signed by Republican governors.

Who are the "certain folks," in Judge Evans's delicate phrase, that the Indiana law is trying to discourage? The best answer can be found in a ...