Proponents of stringent election laws designed to stop fraud surely don’t want to hear that there’s little evidence of chicanery. That’s probably why the results of a federal study on the matter, which was delivered in May, were kept quiet.

Many states have adopted restrictions on voter registration and polling place practices, and the U.S. House of Representatives passed a photo-identification bill aimed at poll-site voting. The Senate is expected to take up the issue next year.

The premise behind all of this legislation is that fraud is widespread. But the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which was established by Congress to ensure voting integrity, commissioned a study that questions that assumption. USA Today obtained the study four months after its completion and recently reported on the findings:

“There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling-place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, ‘dead’ voters, non-citizen voting and felon voters.”

That’s an awfully inconvenient summation for those who back stricter voting laws and consistently assert that there’s rampant fraud while providing scant proof.

Voter fraud is a highly politicized issue. The congressional bill on photo IDs drew the support of 98 percent of Republicans and the opposition of 98 percent of Democrats. And voters in Washington state lived through the partisan wrangling after the razor-thin victory by Chris Gregoire in the 2004 gubernatorial election, when mistakes were quickly relabeled “fraud.”

When a favorite candidate loses a close race, partisans attack the system of voting. It happened in Florida in 2000 and in Washington state in 2004. What’s interesting about the federal commission’s study is that it points to the system that most reforms would not touch as having the highest potential for fraud.

Absentee balloting is more susceptible to manipulation, the report states, via coercion and forgery. But it’s polling places that have been placed under heavy scrutiny by reformers.

The lack of focus on mail-in balloting is probably a political calculation, because it’s popular. Most counties in Washington state have moved to that system.

Politicians can get more mileage hyping the possibility of votes by illegal immigrants and felons, but their solutions can serve to discourage voting by honest citizens.

Unfortunately, the federal commission has played into the hands of those peddling suspicions by choosing not to release its report to the public.

The public deserves to know what is happening with its election systems as it weighs the merit of various reform proposals. But a commission that was formed to zero in on real problems has undermined its credibility by sitting on a report that highlights them.