New York’s Sen. Chuck Schumer was quick to denounce this week’s US Supreme Court ruling upholding the nation’s strictest voter-ID law as “a blow to what America stands for.”

His response might have made more sense if those who’d tried to strike down the Indiana law – which requires the state’s voters to present valid photo IDs – had actually managed to find a single voter who’d been improperly turned away from the polls because of it.

The lack of any injured party is why the justices, in a 6-3 vote, ruled that the voter-ID law’s burden on voters is “minimal and justified” – and, more important, because states have “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.”

Actually, as Byron York noted on these pages last June, Democrats keep insisting, despite all available evidence, that voter fraud doesn’t exist – except when George W. Bush is running for president, that is.

According to the Democrats, any and all efforts to prevent voter fraud are deliberate Republican attempts to keep minorities from the polls.

That’s what Schumer and Hillary Clinton claimed when they were the only ones in the entire Senate who opposed a 2002 bill that provided funding to the states to crack down on fraud.

But consider some of the more outrageous recent instances of voter fraud – all of which favored Democrats:

* In heavily Democratic St. Louis in 2001, the number of registered Democrats actually outnumbered the entire voting-age population; one voter in 10 was also registered elsewhere.

* In the 2004 gubernatorial race in Washington state – which was decided by all of 133 votes – one county yielded 1,800 more ballots cast than the number of people who’d signed in at the polls.

In the wake of such revelations, more than 20 states have enacted laws instituting some form of voter-ID requirement. Even Indiana’s law, which is the toughest, allows those who don’t have photo IDs to cast provisional ballots and then provide other valid ID within 10 days.

That doesn’t sound like an unfair burden – and a majority of the justices rightly agreed. Because too many of those who insist on “counting every vote” want to count those votes – and then some.