In a 6-3 ruling today, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s strict photo ID requirement, allowing states to require voters to present photo identification before casting ballots.

The law was a Republican-backed measure that advocates say combats voter fraud while Democrats and civil rights groups say would disenfranchise poor, older and minority voters.

The application of the statute to the vast majority of Indiana voters is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy.

The law has been in effect since its passage in 2005 and will be used in next week’s presidential primary.

The court ruled that the requirements enacted by Indiana’s legislature were not enough of a burden to invoke constitutional protections.

Three conservative justices — Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and also agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately. Three liberal justices — David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer — dissented.

Democrats say the laws disenfranchise people least likely to have driver’s licenses or passports and who are most likely to vote Democratic.

Stevens noted that it was “fair” to infer that “partisan considerations may have played a significant role” in Indiana’s decision to pass the law.

But if a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators,” Stevens wrote.

More than 20 states, including Virginia, have some form of identification requirement. Courts have upheld voter ID laws in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, but struck down Missouri’s.

Indiana’s ‘Voter ID Law’ threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens and a significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting,” Souter wrote.

Scalia, favoring a stricter voter ID law, said:

The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not ‘even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.’”

Indiana provides IDs free of charge to the poor and allows voters who lack a photo ID to cast a provisional ballot and then provide identification within 10 days.

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