Sometimes it is more important to avoid looking like a bunch of political partisans than it is to reach the most legally sound result.

That was true in the case of Bush v. Gore. The U.S. Supreme Court decision ending the 2000 election litigation and handing the presidency to George W. Bush was legally defensible. But the 5-4 conservative-liberal split — plus a sloppily written majority opinion — left many Americans believing that the justices were grinding partisan axes. It would have been wiser to punt the case to Congress, or to give the Florida Supreme Court one more shot at a recount while rebuking its apparent effort to rig the rules for Al Gore. (See NJ, 1/6/01, p. 8.)

Now comes what The Washington Post calls the Court’s "most politically divisive case since Bush v. Gore." On January 9, the justices will hear arguments on whether Indiana’s 2005 law requiring voters to show government-issued photo identifications at the polls is an unconstitutional burden on voting rights designed to hurt Democrats.

Republicans defend the measure — the strictest of the more than 20 state laws tightening voter-ID requirements since 2000 — as a safeguard against voter fraud. Most Democratic voters also support strict voter-ID laws. But almost all Democratic politicians and legal experts want such laws struck down.

Lower-court judges have also divided along glaringly partisan lines. When a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit upheld the Indiana law, two Republican appointees out-voted Clinton-appointed Judge Terence Evans. Then the full 7th Circuit’s two other Democrats (plus one Republican) joined Evans in voting to rehear the panel’s decision while the five other Republicans backed the panel majority. Similarly, in 2005, the Michigan Supreme Court’s five Republicans upheld a new voter-ID law over dissents by the two Democrats.

The rhetoric is hot. Many Democratic activists (and some judges) denounce photo-ID laws as cynical ploys to "disenfranchise" poor, minority, and elderly voters, even likening them to poll taxes and literacy tests. Many Republicans accuse Democrats of seeking to make it easier to steal elections through fraud.

In fact, neither side has very strong evidence. And it is less than clear that the outcome of any election, ever, will turn on what the justices do in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

The weakness of the Republican position is that the particular variety of voter fraud that photo-ID requirements can prevent — impersonation of registered voters by imposters at the polls — is "an unusually rare occurrence," in the words of Bradley Smith, a Republican former member of the Federal Election Commission.

Defenders of the Indiana law stress that the state’s highly inflated voter rolls, which still listed the names of more than 35,000 dead people and contained more than 200,000 duplicate registrations as of 2004, created a huge risk of voter fraud. And it’s clear that phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, rigged recounts, and old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing are serious problems. But requiring photo IDs cannot prevent those kinds of fraud. Most experts believe that voter fraud by impersonation at the polls is rare because the payoff for the imposter — one more vote for his or her candidate — is very small compared with the risk of being caught and criminally prosecuted. News reports of imposters casting votes in the names of dead (and living) people often turn out to be explained by bungling by election workers or innocent mistakes.

Indeed, nobody in the history of Indiana has been prosecuted for the kind of voter impersonation that the photo-ID law would prevent. This fact led Judge Evans to argue in his dissent that the law "is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic."

The weakness of the Democratic position lies in the scarcity of evidence that Indiana’s photo-ID requirement will prevent very many legal voters from casting ballots.

Indeed, as Reagan-appointed Judge Richard Posner stressed in his opinion for the 7th Circuit panel, the "sponsors of this litigation" conspicuously failed to round up even a single plaintiff whom the photo-ID law would prevent from voting.

Posner did concede that "most people who don’t have photo ID are low on the economic ladder" and that the Indiana law will deter "at least a few" from voting. But he added that the number was too "slight" to have much (if any) impact on election outcomes. And some clearly valid state election rules — such as closing the polls at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30 — might thwart more would-be voters.

The Democratic plaintiffs brandish studies arguing that photo-ID requirements will frustrate many poor and minority voters. But competing studies dispute these claims, with some suggesting that the Indiana law may actually increase turnout by bolstering voter confidence in the integrity of elections.

The plaintiffs also stress that about 11 percent (21 million) of the nation’s voting-age citizens, including 25 percent of African-Americans, lack current government-issued photo IDs. But the federal District judge who initially upheld the law found that in Indiana, 99 percent of qualified voters have photo IDs. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles issues them free of charge to nondrivers as well as drivers who produce specified documentation of their identifies, such as birth certificates, and proof of address.

The Indiana law also has exemptions, including one allowing qualified voters who lack photo IDs to cast provisional ballots on Election Day and then go to a government office within 10 days and either show a newly obtained photo ID or swear out an affidavit that they are indigent and cannot afford the necessary documentation. (A birth certificate can cost more than $20.)

Democratic activists complain that this obligation severely burdens poor voters without photo IDs by effectively requiring them to make two trips at their own expense to government offices within 10 days, where they often run into a "bureaucratic maze." Republicans counter that the Indiana law can be seen as protecting voting rights because every fraudulent vote effectively negates the ballot of a qualified voter.

So it goes, with each side aptly skewering the other’s claims. Who should win?

Although I think that Indiana should make voting a bit easier for low-income people who lack photo IDs, I lean toward Posner’s conclusion: "Perhaps the Indiana law can be improved — what can’t be? — but the details for regulating elections must be left to the states." If perfection were the constitutional standard, the courts would be rewriting state electoral codes wholesale.

It is also significant that opinion polls show that voters increasingly distrust the integrity of the electoral process, with overwhelming majorities across party and racial lines concerned enough about voter fraud to support photo-ID requirements. Perceptions matter.

In an April 2006 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, for example, 81 percent of respondents said yes when asked whether they favored requiring "voters to produce a valid photo identification when they go to vote"; only 7 percent said no, and 12 percent felt "neutral."

For these reasons, I hope to see a vote of at least 6-3 or 7-2 to uphold the Indiana photo-ID law on its face, while specifying that lower courts can require more-generous exceptions if any individual voters can make a strong showing of need.

But what if, as seems quite possible, the Court’s four liberals want to strike down the whole voter-ID law and the four conservatives want to uphold it across the board? Would it be wise for them all to stick to their guns, and push for the balance-tipping Anthony Kennedy to give them a win?

I think not. The last thing that the Court and the country need is a rerun of the partisan passions unleashed by the 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore. If that’s where the Indiana case seems headed after the initial vote in the Court’s secret conference, Chief Justice John Roberts should find some common ground on which at least six other justices — and preferably all of them — can stand.

A logical compromise would be to send the case back to the lower courts for detailed factual findings on two questions: whether the plaintiffs can bear the burden of proving that the number of qualified votes the Indiana law blocks exceeds the number of fraudulent votes it prevents, and whether the state could serve its legitimate anti-fraud objectives while making it easier for voters without photo IDs to have their provisional ballots counted.

The headlines might say something like: "Justices Split the Difference in Voter-ID Case." That would beat the heck out of "Justices Split Along Party Lines Again."