Last Friday, a federal appeals court reinstated Wisconsin’s voter photo identification requirement, which had been ruled unconstitutional by a lower court in April.

This is troubling news for Wisconsinites, as roughly 300,000 registered voters in the state will be disenfranchised. Minorities, college students, the poor, the elderly and the infirm are at the highest risk.

Supporters of the law may say that recent procedural changes will make it easier to obtain proper voter identification. Regardless, this law means that there will be fewer registered voters able to cast ballots in Wisconsin.

Some “procedural changes” will not suddenly re-enfranchise 300,000 citizens before the next election. Moreover, there is no plan to inform disenfranchised individuals that they are no longer eligible to vote, nor is there a plan to help those that are unable to meet the identification standards.

We should not forget the fact that supporters of voter ID laws are trying to fix a nonexistent problem. Voter fraud does not exist in Wisconsin, nor does it exist in the rest of the nation.

Why, then, are Republicans, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, adamantly supporting voter ID laws? The answer is that it benefits them politically, as the law will box out more liberal voters, rather than conservatives. It’s a shame that a few Republican-appointed appeals court justices unethically violated the rights of more than 250,000 registered voters.

Voter ID laws, acting under the guise of preventing voter fraud, suppress voters’ rights for political reasons. For the sake of democracy, they must be abolished.