How would you design an unbiased ID system?
0) Many states that require ID to vote are moving in the direction of permit less carry for firearms. (I think GA, where I live, has the condition that a permit is required but officials are not allowed to request it.)
An unbiased system would recognize that if permitless is sufficient for carrying firearms, it should be sufficient for voting.
0') Recognize that filing other official documents does not require ID. Notably, tax filings do not require any kind of ID, yet the information contained in them is considered extremely sensitive (e.g. knowing the AGI from a form is considered sufficient authentication in some government interactions).
Recognize that many citizens of voting age simply do not need an ID. If you don't buy alcohol, fly on a plane, or drive, your need for ID becomes vanishingly low. If you just do basic stuff like go to the grocery store, physician, and park, you may find that you never need an ID.
So again, do not require ID for this fundamental exercise of participation in government.
1) Accept all federal and state-issued IDs. States have a habit of cherry-picking, for example by accepting firearms licenses and not student IDs. That means accepting student IDs from public universities, among other things.
2) Make the provision of ID the responsibility of the government. That is: IDs should be free to acquire and free to replace. Acquisition of IDs should not be biased against the homebound by e.g. requiring a citizen to present herself in a government office at any time to obtain one. Social Security cards function according to these rules, so our government has known how to do this for generations.
3) Grandfather existing citizens. The last slave in the US died barely 40 years ago; there are likely millions of people born in situations where birth certificates may not have been issued. Pre-computer records were destroyed from time to time. The onus is on the government to track citizens, not the other way around (ref: US Constitution). So there needs to be a way to (transparently, without effort on the citizen's part) get ID to people like my uncle, who has lived in the same place for ~70 years no matter whether he can produce his birth certificate.
The basic problem is once you do all that, you defeat the goals of the modern voter ID project. So there's no reason to aim for an unbiased ID system here. Either aim for the real goals (which require bias) or don't implement voter ID.
If they are not eligible to vote, then obviously we do not them voting. It's one of the few situations where identity really matters.
Historically, representative government has been one of the most effective tools to defend life in the US.
> If they are not eligible to vote
ID checks do not verify eligibility at the time of voting. I can show up with a perfectly valid driver's license and be ineligible to vote for any number of reasons (I am a convicted felon, I am not eligible to vote in this county because I moved and my new license is still being processed, I renounced my citizenship this morning, etc.)
Going the other way -- a person who becomes eligible to vote just in time to cast a legitimate ballot may have trouble producing a valid picture ID confirming this status in time for the election.
This is a really important goal.
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to enforce this at the schema level of the vote database?
Building 50 (different, incompatible) state-level infrastructures to fairly distribute IDs according to principles like those above seems like the one of the harder of all possible ways to accomplish this goal.
You could not enforce anything at a schema level without having a way to authenticate who is who, which is accomplished by a human verifying their IDentity.
We already have a 50-state ID system, and it works well. Anyone can get a ID. Centralizing it would make it less reliable because it's easier to attack one system than 50.
You could enforce precisely the goal of only one vote per registered voter.
> We already have a 50-state ID system
That's the point -- we don't, and we don't use what we have very well. The closest thing we have to universal ID cards is the Social Security card, and advocates of voter ID don't want to use it. (In fact, no combination of the source documents used to prove identity for official US business are valid for voting in many states.)
But we definitely do not have a 100% free 50-state ID system that makes it anywhere near as easy to get an ID as is the case for e.g. a Social Security card or passport.
And that's basically the entire sticking point: is it okay for it to be easy for 80% of the populace? 90%? Or does it need to be 100%?
Without ID? How?
What state makes it difficult to get an ID?
> Without ID? How?
At the schema level, by only allowing one vote per voter ID. In theory, that voter could have been impersonated, but that's a different problem than ensuring only one vote per registered voter. Perhaps, like in most things, we could have a procedure for handling conflicts when a voter determined her voter number had been used twice during an election, instead of clumsily pushing a pre-resolution onto every potential voter.
(The legal cases seem to turn on the fact that the pro-ID folks haven't been able to show any substantial evidence that voter impersonation happens at any scale where it warrants a legislative response. So preventing dupes should be sufficient.)
> What state makes it difficult to get an ID?
I don't know about all of them, but when I have lived in (GA, MA, TX, NY) you had to physically present yourself during business hours for an unspecified and unpredictable amount of time to get the type of ID that satisfies a voter ID law.
As a relatively well-off, generally healthy person who tends to live in the parts of states where they put these offices, the burden on me usually boils down to losing a few hundred/thousand dollars of my time going to an office during business (work) hours to "prove" I'm me.
None of this would be easy if I were less healthy. Or didn't have a car. Or control of my schedule. Or lived in a rural area. Or absolutely needed the money I would earn during the part of the work day when the offices are open. Or could only afford to lose the earnings from making one trip to the office, but it was too full that day so I couldn't make a second. Or a combination of these. Basically: this is our government, why is it trying to tell us when we can and can't get a say?
Designing a system so that it works for people like me doesn't mean it works.
but here we are... apparently suppose to pretend that your suggestion would even remotely prevent people from voting multiple times, or prevent ineligible people from voting.
"physically present yourself"
You say that like there is some other way to verify identity from first principals.