<START> Second Thoughts on Voter ID On Friday, Richard Posner, a highly respected federal judge, offered an unusual admission. He had made a mistake, he said, in voting to uphold one of the country's first voter-ID laws. As courts in Texas, North Carolina and other states deal with litigation over ever-stricter versions of such laws - all enacted in the name of preventing nonexistent fraud - the question is what effect Judge Posner's admirable candor could have. In 2005, Indiana passed a law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. Opponents sued, saying the law would mainly prevent those most likely not to have photo IDs - poor, elderly, and minority voters - from voting. Judge Posner, a Reagan appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, rejected the challenge because he saw no evidence that any voters would be disenfranchised, and reducing vote fraud was a legitimate state goal - despite the fact that Indiana had never prosecuted anyone for that crime. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2008, and proponents of voter-ID laws have relied on that opinion ever since. In an interview with HuffPost Live on Friday, Judge Posner acknowledged that he had failed to appreciate how voter-ID laws would be abused when he wrote the decision upholding the Indiana statute. "Maybe we should have been more imaginative," he said. We weren't really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disenfranchise people entitled to vote. Those indications were clear, of course, to judges who disagreed with Judge Posner at the time. In a new book, he writes that he was "guilty" of upholding a law "now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention." Had he spoken those words a few years ago, the landscape of voter-ID laws might look very different.