A reader shares Nina Totenberg’s take on the voter ID law:

“Since the fateful 2000 election, Republicans in many states have pushed for voter ID laws to stave off what they see as a major problem: voter fraud through voter impersonation at the polls. But studies have shown the problem does not exist.”

Does not exist, eh? How about the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s excellent 2005 coverage of the fact that the problem is real?

Investigators said Tuesday they found clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person.

And here’s the paper’s original story on their survey that found 1,200 suspicious addresses of those who cast votes in Milwaukee in 2004:

A spot check of addresses that came back as invalid found cases where the address in question is a park, a baseball diamond and at or near the W. Wisconsin Ave. bridge. In most cases, though, there simply was no building at that address…
In about 20% of the cases, it appears as though a clerical error led to the invalid address…But for 80% of the other names in that sample list, no one with the name could immediately be found in other public record searches. That means there are potentially hundreds of cases in which a vote was counted for someone whose existence could not be confirmed, at an address that does not exist.

Recall that the election in Wisconsin was extremely close that year.

Opponents of common-sense ID laws are essentially anti-democratic. How else do you describe someone who wants to let a baseball diamond cancel out my vote?

UPDATE: Kirby Wilbur of KVI in Seattle writes to remind me of the 2004 Washington governor’s race.