Last Wednesday, in a truly stunning partisan ruling, a Pennsylvania Republican judge named Robert Simpson declined to block a new state law requiring specific kinds of photo identification to vote.

In his ruling, Simpson admitted that there MIGHT have been a partisan motive behind the law and that it might indeed cause difficulties for tens of thousands of voters on Nov. 6. Ya think? Pennsylvania’s Republican House majority leader, Mike Turzai stated in a video that’s gone viral that the law “is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state Pennsylvania.”

Simpson said he believed promises by state officials that they would get ID cards into the hands of the vast majority of residents who needed them by Election Day, and that those with difficulties would be able to vote through a provisional or an absentee ballot.

But according to Pennsylvania’s Department of State and the Department of Transportation, as many as 758,000 people, about 9 percent of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters, currently don’t have the identification that now will be required at the polling place. Even if 90 percent of those voters got the correct identification by Nov. 6, that still could leave 75,800 voters disenfranchised.

But Pennsylvania is only the tip of the iceberg. Nine states — South Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama —have passed strict voter ID laws, despite the fact that there is virtually no evidence of voter ID fraud.

In a new nationwide analysis of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000, reporters Natasha Khan and Corbin Carson found a total of 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters. David Schultz, Hamline University professor of public policy, is quoted in the article as saying that, “There is absolutely no evidence that voter fraud has affected the outcome of any election in the United States, at least any recent election in the United States.”

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the Pennsylvania ID law violates the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minorities. And Judge Simpson’s ruling has been appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But the appeal may be too late to stop the current law from disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters in the November election.