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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I'm registered in 3 states (I always kinda assumed registering in a new state unregistered you in another) and my wife is registered in 2. I wonder if my name is on that list. Damn even the criteria they use doesn't technically have to be unique; it's possible to have the same name, DOB and last 4 digits of a SSN (though that's likely incredibly rare but still the possibility is theoretically there).

I feel as if our entire election and voting process needs a `re-write`.

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Yeah, that's nuts, there are 20 other people with my name just living in the bay area. That system could wipe out some non-zero percent of the Irish vote.

> I feel as if our entire election and voting process needs a `re-write`.

I'm not American, but in my opinion this should have been the the major issue in this election. All the tripe about email servers and orange-tinted buffoons seems designed purely to prevent people considering this.

May I humbly suggest two things: first, you swap the right to bear arms for the right to hold citizen's initiated referendums. As I understand it, the second amendment was designed to prevent government tyranny, but it's obviously not working and causes a LOT of collateral damage.

Second, somehow beef up your fourth estate. Citizens need reliable information that is not tainted by political or corporate agendas. I have no idea how to do this, but you are a resourceful people.

> May I humbly suggest two things: first, you swap the right to bear arms for the right to hold citizen's initiated referendums.

Most states have them, and they're pretty terrible. Get 51% of those of your fellow citizens who bother to show up to support it, and a referendum can rewrite any law — worse, an amendment can write anything into the state constitution.

Our problem at the moment is that we're too much a democracy and too little a republic.

> Second, somehow beef up your fourth estate.

I think that the media — particularly their coverage of the primaries — bear a great deal of the blame for today. Making them stronger would exacerbate that.

>I'm not American, but in my opinion this should have been >the the major issue in this election.

It won't be a major issue unless it negatively effects the establishment candidate (whomever that happens to be).

Merely last name and DOB brings up a fairly unique value. This is what Walgreens, and others, now use instead of SSN.

There was an earlier HN item about how DOB, gender, and Zip identifies 87% of the US population uniquely. No SSN needed in either case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967

I would argue that 87% is an unacceptable margin of error given that we are talking about the presidential election.

That margin of error is across the whole country. Vote checking would run over a much smaller area.

It doesn't matter if it's across the whole country because the identification incorporates zipcodes. All ambiguities are local to a single town.

agreed and upvoted.

This would be to find those multi-registered voters. Considering the current system is merely first + lastname, I think either approach above would be superior and without leaking SSN's to yet another government database.

Every time someone brings up a national ID card (unique key), everyone gets really upset, unfortunately.

Yeah honestly I don't get the outrage. A national ID would solve a ton of issues. Individual states could add information to and remove from the ID and it could link up everything. Even people who are for voting IDs it could be used for that as long as it didn't cost anything.

Yeah I know it can help "track" you. Look, you're already being tracked far more without the damn thing. In my opinion a national ID would be well worth it.

I'll hold my breath.

As a software developer who has had to answer the tough question of "how do we identify our users?", a tiny part of me wishes every human had a UUID tattooed on.

Our DNA is actually one heck of a unique fingerprint, but it's currently still quite hard to read... when that changes things will get interesting.

There are also cases where DNA fails, notably twins and chimerae.

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