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Comment by mrsalt | Hacker News Reader

Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela (when you could actually vote) are also federations (and not the only ones). Brazil's population is 210M and Mexico 126M. They all have national identity cards which can be used for voting like the parent comment says.

If there was will in the US for a national ID, Congress and the powers that be could achieve this within a few years if they wanted.

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I am not saying that the US being a federation is the underlying reason for our lack of a national ID card used for voting. It's just part of the context that makes changing the situation difficult.

The reason is the combination of:

1. The power to run elections was delegated to the states

2. States don't want to give up that power

3. The only way to change that would be for the states to vote to give up those powers

Yes, as you point out, not all federations are this way. Many others are missing #1 or #3 above. I pointed out that the US was a federation simply for legal context. As of course, local governments don't really have much power against the central government in a unitary state.

that's great, republicans should hop on issuing a national identity card that can be used to vote in elections, instead of using state-level restrictions as a way to suppress voting.

Democrats would be onboard with a free federally administered voting ID. Republicans wouldn't, though, because it's not about fraud, it's about making it more difficult to vote, because they lose when more people vote, and they literally said as much to the supreme court as a justification for their voter restrictions laws.

(they see it as "political party is not a protected class, so there is no legal prohibition from creating voter laws which are designed to disadvantage their political opponents")

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-gop...

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