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The U.S. Supreme Court has discredited the new voter-identification laws, but has, nevertheless, blessed them as constitutional.

These laws, passed in Ohio and elsewhere by Republican state legislators, require some sort of identification to be presented at the polling place. In the past, Ohio had settled for taking a voter's signature and comparing it to the one he or she gave when registering.

The new laws can only guard against one kind of abuse: the impersonation of a specific registered voter. That's important to understand.

Confusion has been sown aggressively. When this issue first went to the U.S. Supreme Court, one nationally syndicated columnist wrote: "How is a voter registrar to determine whether someone is, in fact, eligible without some form of legitimate identification? ... If potential voters are illegal aliens (or convicted felons, or do not live where they claim) without proper IDs, how can they possibly be 'eligible' to vote?"

But all that is irrelevant. The voter ID movement isn't about registrars or registration, and it isn't about illegal aliens. (If you were an illegal alien, would you try to vote?)

As for the alleged problem the new laws are about, opponents have been saying all along that it doesn't exist. Now, writing the lead opinion of the court, Justice John Paul Stevens says the court's record has "no evidence" of people trying to vote under another person's registration in Indiana, the subject of the legal case. Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy signed the decision. Nobody contradicted the point.

The absence of a problem was compelling to the three justices who opposed the decision, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. They thought that a state shouldn't be imposing even a small burden on would-be voters unless it can show a need to.

"The interest in combating voter fraud," wrote Justice Souter, "has too often served as a cover for unnecessarily restrictive electoral rules."

But the court held, 6-3, that a state needn't prove that a problem exists to address it with a small, nondiscriminatory requirement. Democrats have argued in legislatures that the ID requirements are discriminatory against aged, ill, urban, poor and/or uneducated people. They are the people most likely not to have a driver's licence or other form of ID. Proponents respond that if such people run into a problem at the polls, they can cast "provisional" ballots while their registration is sorted out. Yes, the other side says, but this process still puts a special burden on certain people. These people tend to vote Democratic.

Therein lies the obvious motivation of the Republican politicians.

The life of the issue in legislatures has shown something about the especially partisan nature of these times. The same Republican politicians who present themselves as opponents of unnecessary government regulation impose new regulations to deal with a nonproblem, and yet no criticism comes from within the party.

The things some partisans are willing to say now are amazing. Rep. John Boehner, of West Chester, the Republican leader in the U.S. House: "The American people can have renewed faith in their government's ability to conduct fair and honest elections."

Ohio's law isn't as bad as some. The Republican legislature and former Republican governor did impose new ID requirements, but those requirements do not include a photo (much less a government-issued photo ID with an expiration date, as in Indiana).

The importance of the issue should not be overstated. Many voters have always expected to be asked for an ID when they vote. And, after all, the new restrictions on Democratic voters did not prevent the Republican electoral debacle of 2006.

Still, the motivation of the laws couldn't be more clear. And it stinks.

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