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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

The point I am trying to make is that being forced to have IDs when voting is common. I didn't know about the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws

Reading that quite short list, it seems like Australia, Canada, UK and the US are the only ones which do not require IDs. I wonder if it has something to do with old British legal system, that they kind off share.

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Wait a second. Canada does require an ID. From someone.

If the would be voter doesn't have ID, then someone who knows them has to make a sworn affidavit that the voter is who they claim to be.

Thats not the same thing as we have in the US

This distinction isn't quite so clear-cut. At least in Ontario, any form of documentation listing the voter's name is sufficient [1], which they explicitly state can include a credit/debit card. The more stringent voter ID laws in some parts of the US (e.g. Texas) tend to concern government-issued photo IDs [2].

EDIT: Note, in particular, that a utility bill (e.g. a gas bill as mentioned in an ancestor comment) is sufficient in Ontario. For the purposes of this comment thread, this would fall into the (allegedly) laughable situation of lacking voter ID.

[1] https://www.elections.on.ca/en/voting-in-ontario/id-requirem...

[2] https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm

I didn't go through the entire list, but it does seem like a lot of those countries either use a standard national ID, or have a nationally issued voter ID.

Unfortunately, federally assigned IDs are a weirdly hot-button issue in America. Whether it's the libertarian insistence that national ID leads to authoritarianism[1], or the evangelical strain that sees it as a potential Mark of the Beast[2].

[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/you-value-privacy-resist-any...

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-national-biometric-id_b_5...

National ID is certainly not a requirement for voter ID, and there’s no reason I can find so far that state/local ID couldn’t be mandated instead. While you’re correct that most countries that require voter ID have a national ID card, I would guess that’s more of a correlation due to a latent variable that underlies both of these: possibly some sort of trust in a national authority (relative to local authorities), ease and necessity of international travel within Europe requiring convenient proof of citizenship, etc.

State IDs being used for voting means that who gets to vote is controlled by individual States ID laws, and we don't generally trust other States to get it right.

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