What the high court did not say is that states should do so.

The justices left it up to individual states to decide if adopting a "Voter ID" law makes sense.

And in Wisconsin, it doesn 't.

Requiring a photo ID every time someone goes to the polls is unnecessary, given scant evidence of fraud. Requiring a photo ID to vote in Wisconsin also could harm our state's proud history of higher participation in democracy.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 last week to uphold Indiana's law requiring voters to produce government-issued photo identification. Indiana lawmakers approved the law in 2005, arguing it was needed to prevent fraud.

But Indiana has experienced no reports of the kind of fraud the law was supposed to target, according to the Associated Press.

That doesn 't mean Indiana can't require photo IDs if it wants to, the high court ruled. Yet the court is fine with Wisconsin wisely rejecting more barriers to voting in the absence of evidence that stricter rules are needed.

Wisconsin votes at just about the highest rate in the nation. Seventy-three percent of Wisconsin's adult population cast ballots in the 2004 presidential election.

The only state with a higher voting percentage was Minnesota, at 77 percent. Indiana was near the bottom at 57 percent.

Wisconsin enjoys greater turnout in part because our state has long made it easy to vote. Wisconsin is one of the few states, for example, that allows citizens to register to vote right at the polls on Election Day. Citizens also can register using a recent utility bill with their name and address on it. They don't have to produce a driver's license or passport.

Following the 2004 presidential election, irregularities at polling places in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee prompted legitimate concern about fairness.

But state and federal investigators -- one of them a Republican -- concluded no organized fraud took place. Instead, clerical mistakes were a problem. And action was taken to prevent similar flubs in the future.

Lacking a compelling reason to require photo IDs at the polls, Wisconsin should continue to make voting easy for everyone. Showing a driver's license is no big deal for most citizens. But for the poor and elderly who don't have or need or can't easily afford a driver's license, the requirement "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands," wrote Justice David Souter in a dissenting opinion.

Wisconsin is virtually the best state in the nation at voting. Our Legislature should strive to keep it that way.