Sure, require ID; but it must be freely available and easily accessible, and states which end up with different ID takeup rates for different races should be prosecuted.
Where I'm from everybody is required by law to have one from the age of 14 and gets it for free for the first time. You just can't have anything done without id and tax identification code, so voting is just another place to show it. It's not even about technologies - my is handwritten with photo being glued on it.
The ID law has been shown to be slanted to disfavor the working poor who vote for one party over another. It's not done as a legitimate concern over fraud; its a political maneuver to favor one party over the other and disenfranchise the poor. That's the argument
Sure, it isn't easy, but they get ID because they need it for damn near everything. For example, you mentioned "work hours". If they are legally working, they have ID. If they get any sort of welfare, they have ID. If they smoke or drink, they have ID.
“Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income.”
From http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...
It is assumed that the people claiming to be Americans without ID are in fact Americans without ID. It's kind of hard to verify this without ID, eh? The given percentages are in the ballpark for estimates of illegal aliens, meaning that these might be people who aren't supposed to have an American ID and in fact aren't supposed to vote.
It wasn't a problem for voting because the poll workers knew most of the nursing home residents socially. This was a small town and some of the poll workers even attended primary school over half a century ago with the nursing home residents. As our communities become looser and looser knit, this kind of informal identification system loses its integrity. Our identification card issuing system hasn't kept up with this change in society. Fix that problem and the rest fixes itself.
So the remaining opposition is more symbolical than anything - accepting a national ID would be acquiescing to this state of affairs, while rejecting it allows to maintain the pretense that all the massive data-gathering operations (from IRS and Social Security, to DHS and NSA) are somehow fundamentally different.
In practice, this just means extreme inefficiency whenever you have to deal with the government. I would dare say that citizens actually suffer a lot more from it than the government does (the government can always hire more bureaucrats to maintain and synchronize more databases).
Stopping identity theft would reduce the cost of banking, including all kinds of credit, bringing consumer interest rates closer to non-consumer ones. Stopping identity theft would quickly cause the arrest of most fugitives, both immigration-related and otherwise. Stopping identity theft would reduce medical errors; today your treatment can be affected by an identity thief. (the doctors think you have drug-seeking behavior, a genetic condition, a disease, or issues with violence toward hospital staff... and this changes how they treat you)
I have never been able to file my taxes electronically because I cannot pass their electronic verification process.
They have to verify birth date, which they think is something else other than my actual birth date.
I have spent hours and hours being shuffled around between different governmental offices, explaining my case, and it got to a point where you have to give up. Have you ever seen the movie Brazil? You might know what I'm talking about.
Imagine having to be reduced to calling around your city, trying to find the nearest fax machine because some governmental office will only take faxes so that you can continue your quest towards the distant sanity...
Now imagine doing that when you work an hourly service job instead of a salaried engineering job.
So at least in those states, it isn't an issue. You have every day off from work.
In some states, you'd have committed a crime already
1) you don't need any drivers license to be employed in anything but driving
2) all states recognize other states' licenses ("full faith and credit") until a grace period after you take up actual residency or employment.
2) Sure, you can drive there. You can work there even. You can't combine them: working while having an out-of-state license is a crime.
If you try to move to a federal ID, you de facto need to replace a bunch of state run offices with federal offices. This would not be an easy transition at all. It would be easier to create federal regulations and require states to alter their state ID to comply by X date, but states tend to resist that kind of interference from the federal government.
The US is a little bit like a country of countries. It would be a little bit like requiring an EU ID and European countries objecting.
For half a century social security cards had "not for identification" written on them because they are really bad for ID. Didn't stop everyone from using them as ID because there was no other option. The Social Security administration was the only government agency actually tasked with tracking citizens for their entire lives so they did that. Poorly.
If you want to understand why requiring any state ID is voter disenfranchisement in the US just consider what it takes to get a state ID as a fresh adult. Two recognized proofs of ID. Basically birth certificate, student ID, social security card, or other state ID. If you don't get a student ID, didn't go to high school, or your ID from there simply expired it can't count. So its basically requiring birth certificate and social security card.
Now thats where you might not recognize how weird the US is. Nobody is required to have those. Hospitals do the paperwork to get them issued when you are born there but for every child not born under the supervision of a doctor (way too many to this day in the US) your parents do need to actually apply for those. Of course that only matters if you are filing taxes to begin with. Which is disproportionately whites. A ridiculous number of people exist outside the tax system because... the government doesn't know who its citizens are. It doesn't keep track of anyone in a central way. If you IRS never started getting pay stubs from your employers they might not even know you exist.
This is in addition to having the means to get to a DMV, pay the fee to get an ID card (I think it was $25 when I got one to fly to Texas when I was 17?) and be able to go there during some obscenely limited hours of operation (some of the worst offenders I've seen are only open 10-2 on three weekdays). Then you also need a permanent address to get it shipped to.
For way too many people they are missing something in that chain, and if you find yourself without two qualified forms of ID getting a birth certificate or social security card where you never had one before can take months at least.
What might sound really bizarre to you is that there is nothing to really "catch" kids that fell through the system. School enrollment is completely decoupled from all the previously mentioned systems of tracking people - you don't need any major documents to enroll your kid in a public school, often not even proof of legitimate residency in the country. Schools want those but the laws are state specific and often simply "try to figure out who they are or just drop them in class somewhere I guess". So you can easily graduate high school with no government institution knowing you exist whatsoever, go to get a job, and find out your employer won't hire you without this backlog of paperwork nobody made sure you had.
This whole mess, as others say, disproportionately affects minorities and the poor. They are less likely to have parents who can afford hospitalization for the birth so they don't get the paperwork done for them. They don't pay taxes or work under the table and thus don't itemize their children or apply to get their documents to get tax rebates. They get them enrolled in school without having any documentation of their own. They go their entire childhood using health clinics and whatever their mom thinks is best to get through because they don't have health insurance and never show up in that system. Nobody in their family can afford a car so getting into the drivers registry isn't even on the radar for any of them.
There are millions of legitimate born US citizens to American parents without a paper trail because they live in poverty. Its the 1 in 4 food insecure kids growing up today. Their towns and cities are practically blighted with mistreatment by every institution that has any influence on their success. I live in central PA and see this all the time - neighborhoods can be 10 miles apart where on one side they don't have regularly working electricity and water while on the other end you have mcmansions and three newly built shopping centers composed of Whole Foods and Old Navy. One of those groups is going to have their learners permit at 16 and be preregistered to vote without even knowing it, the other would have to spend years of time fighting to form the paper trail to register to vote.
And its a legitimate fight. My parents lost my social security card at some point in my early childhood and it took 2 years and 3 visits to the DMV to get a replacement. Good thing that happened when I was 12 and not 18 or I would have missed upwards of two elections like that. And I was on the lucky side of the ID disparity - born in a hospital, records of doctors all the way through, proper paper trail in the public school system, and it still takes several hours of your life to get through the beuracracy to have a drivers license or state ID by the time you are eligible to vote. Way too many people don't have the paperwork or the time to try to use it as a barrier to voting.
In the US, one of the founding principles, different from all (almost all?) others at the time, was the people create the government to govern for them. Government was not suppose to be a system where the government (ie. the monarchy) rules and owns the people. I don't think it is such a bad idea that people are resistant to a national ID. "Show me your papers" and all that comes with it is something to avoid if possible.
Its hard to get your first ID specifically because of the desire to limit immigration fraud.
My major issue with the thought process that gets you to "having a national is a violation of my freedom" is that you only want to be invisible if the government is an actively hostile entity to you that you want to avoid. It is also the principal justification to the right to bear arms - you arm the citizens against a tyrannical government.
The problem is that in both cases - if you have a government that you want to hide from anonymously or a government you need to arm yourself against - you have a government you need to overthrow. You don't just exist in this state of armament or anonymity without taking action to depose the king and reclaim your liberty.
In both cases there are real, persistent, continuous costs of not having a centralized record of citizenry with secure id (because social security cards are not even close to secure) as there with keeping recreational firearms ownership so permissive. The former means people fall through the cracks and need to exert tremendous effort to prove they exist while the later costs life and limb all the time.
If US history has taught me anything (in regards to the history of most nations) its that when trying to preserve liberty its a fine line between disdainful paranoia and reasonable ambivalence. And American culture definitely falls towards the extreme on that spectrum in a, in my opinion, really unhealthy way. It just breeds controversy and arguments about ideology without anyone actually doing anything to improve the world they live in for either outcome... which is a generally common thread in US politics, to be fair.
My parents lost my social security card at some point in my early childhood and it took 2 years and 3 visits to the DMV to get a replacement