Hailing this as necessary to prevent voter fraud is just as preposterous as the mark-of-the-beast nonsense covered by another child comment.
The current federated system using state drivers' licenses seems fine to me, it's been functional through all of RealID's delays.
It's not needed to prevent voter fraud in the US because there is very little voter fraud to prevent. What it could help with is reducing voter suppression.
Several states, claiming that it is necessary to prevent fraud (which they cannot actually find any significant examples of) have instituted voter ID requirements.
In many of these there has been a pretty good correlation between what ID they accept and whether or not the people who tend to vote for the party enacting the ID require are more likely to already have that form of ID than the people who tend to vote for the other party.
These are often accompanied by changes to how IDs are issued that make it significantly harder for many people who vote for the other party to obtain ID. For example, state IDs are often issued by the same department that issues driver's licenses. Some states, citing budget issues, have closed such offices, with the closures hitting hardest is largely minority areas, and reduced hours in the offices remaining open eliminating weekend and evening hours.
This makes it so that for many people in those areas that lost their offices getting an ID means losing a day of work or more, which many of them cannot afford and so have to give up voting.
A Federal ID that is easy to obtain for all citizens, very cheap or free, and that states are required to accept as voter ID could go a long way to helping eligible voters actually be able to vote.
This is the key point, though, and harder than it sounds. It needs to be (at least approximately) free-as-in-beer with a small time investment, while still gathering adequate evidence of identity. My best idea is to build it as an outgrowth of the passport infrastructure without the relatively onerous forms and other costs. Doing it through the post office like passports is as good an idea as any, but you need to make sure they all have (working![0]) cameras and trained personnel. Not cheap.
I'm all for the idea, I just don't want people to underestimate the difficulty, because that will make it more likely to fail.
[0] When I went to get my passport, the camera at the post office was broken. I had to run across the street to the drug store. Not fatal, but a pain, and not something you could tolerate at scale for voter id.
There are plenty of places where just a drivers license isn’t acceptable (getting a passport for instance) and requires you to play the stupid 1/2 from category A/B game.
I agree that bringing up voting is a red herring, that’s a state thing and the several states should solve that for themselves. The US federal government needs a unified ID system which was designed as a robust, centralized ID system that can then be mandated for federal agencies to use.
The state I live in (Arizona) requires proof your presence is authorized to get state ID. If you are a citizen, that means proof of citizenship. But then loop back to supreme court decision above.
That ruling doubles down on it being a state thing by saying leave citizenship (which is a federal thing) out of it. If a state creates for itself a catch-22, that is the states fault and is therefore the states responsibility to fix.
Arizona needs to stop shirking it’s responsibility to its residents and come up with a solution to this problem, just like virtually every other state has.
If SCOTUS says states can't require proof of citizenship for voter registration, how can they exclude non-citizens from voter rolls? The state hasn't created a catch-22; the federal judiciary has told the states that they effectively can't use citizenship as a requirement for voting.
I feel like I'm missing something here, because this can't be the state of things.
> We have a national ID issue which needs to be fixed.
What issue is this? Why do we need a national ID? What purpose would one serve? Plenty of Americans go through their lives just fine without any sort of federally-issued ID. Pretty much all you have to do is never travel outside the US, and many Americans don't.
Aside from the hundreds of other cost-and-convenience reasons, eliminating the SSN (and associated fraud) would be easily worth it on its own.
Even if it were true that plenty of people get through life without a federal ID, that doesn’t mean all do. As I have said other places in this thread, the rickety machinery of federal identity replication grinds up plenty of people.
What is that issue? It is not apparent to me that REAL ID solves a real problem.
https://www.ssa.gov/fraud/#:~:text=How%20to%20report%20fraud....
This was a genuine question. It's not obvious to me why it would matter which primary key people used in their customer databases, but fraud is also not something I worry about or really even think about.
Currently your SSN is your client secret, but it’s a terrible one and we should replace it with a more robust secret. I shouldn’t be able to steal your identity by knowing a short number with minimal entropy.
What IDs are you referring to and what’s the headache? Presumably one ID is a passport. From your first sentence, I would assume the second ID is a social security number, but how does it become “out of sync” with a passport?
Get a passport as a minor, change your name as an adult, realize SSA has your wrong bday, descend into bureaucracy hell as now both name and DOB don’t match.
While I am sure the bureaucracy surrounding such discrepancies is enormous, I’m not for sure I understand how it relates to a discussion about national IDs. A passport is effectively an optional national ID, so none of these issues would be solved by a national ID.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) issues IDs at the federal level, which are applied for using state or county issued birth certificates (as well as other ways). They sometimes make clerical errors. Those errors can propagate into other federal identity databases, such as the taxpayer record system operated by the Internal Revenue Service or the passport database operated by the Department of State.
The linkages between these systems are fragile or nonexistent, and if you are not careful about manually propagating changes between them you can end up in an inconsistent state which requires court action to rectify.
Passports are often used in lieu of social security cards because people are (correctly!) leery about using their SSN directly. I know people who have no intention of traveling internationally who have gotten passports because it’s extremely convenient to have a federally issued photo id.
I have neglected to get my state's real ID since it requires me to go into a location, which are soul sucking. Luckily, my global entry card is a Real ID. It only took two years to get that one. And when I had to go in for that ID, they didn't even check my driver's license or passport for ID. They just took my picture and that was it. Pretty poor due diligence.
Funnily enough I was able to fly without an ID when I lost my license--which was surprisingly hassle-free. But I had a hell of a time checking into my hotel.
You haven’t needed it since it’s such a bad ID that if you know the number you often don’t need to possess the paper.
You can also use a birth certificate to establish right to work, so yeah it wouldn’t be required.
Of course now I just use my passport, but like many Americans I didn’t have one for many years.
Eventually I was able to track down the underlying laws that the relevant rules were based on and call the head office in Charleston who put things right, but who knows what would've happened had I not been a native English speaker.
Some of this may have changed, it looks like "8 FAM 403.1-4(D)" would've been the rule that I needed back when I did this, and it does not appear to be currently classified, but lots of other rules still are. Point is, it may not be as simple as you'd think to "just" get a new passport.
What ID is that? If you're talking about a Social Security Card, that's not ID at all. I don't think I would call it "ID but not very good", even.
Ultimately there are a lot of people who go through life in the US who never have a federally-issued ID at all. Simply never traveling outside the US will do it for most people. And there are more people than you'd expect in the US who never leave the country.
Also agree re: voting: elections are administered by states, so a federal ID is just not even necessary here. States are perfectly capable of issuing ID, as we all know. (Granted, drivers licenses and non-driving state IDs usually don't have anything to say about citizenship status. A state-issued ID serves as authentication, not authorization, where voting is concerned.)
Why are you against having a good one?
`s/is/should be/`
If I have your social security card I can pretend to be you quite effectively as many people will accept it as an ID. They don’t care that you don’t think it is one. The ones that don’t will frequently take an alternative (read: derived) that I can get with just it.
> It doesn't contain evidence that can feasibly be used to prove…
Yes. We agree, it’s a bad ID.
Though don't actually know as I haven't had one in decades.
You do have one, or if you insist you were issued one, you just don’t possess it.
At one point the lifelock guy had something like 200 W.Va licenses since in the mid-aughts they didn’t actually check to see if that SSN had a license already.
W.Va license gets you a passport. Passport gets you anything you want.
The only thing standing between you and full-blown has-a-passport identity theft is your Social Security Card.
Edit: You can intuitively prove that everywhere doesn’t require a photo ID because some piece of ID has to come first.
The state of West Virginia will give you a (non-RealID) drivers license with a social security card and 2 pieces of mail. Card to prove your identity and mail to prove that name went with a W.Va address.
It’s an ID, issued by the Federal Government, and every American has one. Now that all the insanity and gymnastics are over can we please just make it better?
> I would still class them under "powerful fools"
Cool, but your opinion of them is irrelevant. They get to decide what forms of ID they’ll take, and they’ve decided to take this one.
> you could just write your name on an index card and use that instead
Of course you couldn’t, the rule is very clear that you can identify yourself with specifically a social security card. You’re the one pretending. Your insistence that it’s not an ID will be small comfort when someone fakes yours and used it to identify themselves as you to steal your identity.
Again. The fact that it’s a terrible form of ID is my point. It being a bad ID doesn’t mean it’s not one.
Edit: I copy/pasted my point about W.Va from one thread to another. Both say, as the law does, that it identifies you. The mail ties the identified person to an address authorized for a license (i.e. an address in the state). It’s authn vs authz.
It’s not do you, it’s can you.
But I guess you can keep on being scared of leaking your SSN (that everyone unofficially uses as an ID anyways) and keep on using different cards depending on the state. There's a reason identity theft is so prevalent in the US, and pretty much nowhere else in the world.
That’s decidedly untrue.
https://focusonbusiness.eu/en/news/one-in-five-europeans-hav...
This is mostly due to not using a short, immutable identifier (like the US SSN) effectively as a bearer token, as far as I can tell.
Even getting a copy (or even the original!) of somebody's passport or driver's license is not enough to open a bank account or a credit card in many EU countries; in Germany, you need to actually appear in front of a bank employee (or subcontractor), personally or in a video chat, verify your identity, and confirm your intention to open a new account.
It should be easy to tell a bank to screw off when they issue a fraudulent account, it isn't the named parties fault that the bank wasn't diligent.
is that true?
I know Australia, UK, Ireland, US, don't have a national ID, while almost all EU countries do. What does it look like elsewhere?
I don't want to government to know that much about me. It has been proven over and over that less is better.
Eh. In most states you are required to get a new DL if you move. So, in fact, you have to tell the state where you live.
Whereas with a national ID, that wouldn't be tied to a place of residence.
Why would you assume that? our current substitute for a national ID (state issued ID compliant with the federal REAL ID Act) requires current address, and has higher standards for proof of address than many pre-REAL ID state IDs did.
Not really. I file my tax return and the address isn't where I live. It doesn't have to be, it's a mailing address.
Conversely, the most common state ID (driver's license) is effectively mandatory to carry at all times for most Americans because it is required to drive a motor vehicle and driving a motor vehicle is required to move around outside of major urban areas.