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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

Edit: firstly, this is a distraction (i.e. a red herring) from the debate about national IDs. We have a national ID issue which needs to be fixed.

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.

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What's the solution, though? I live in California, and my state-issued ID doesn't say anything about my US citizenship. When I registered to vote (online), I had to certify that I was eligible to vote. Yes, the penalties for lying are steep, but if the state can't verify if I'm lying or not, how will I get caught?

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.

> What purpose would one serve?

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.

> We have a national ID issue which needs to be fixed.

What is that issue? It is not apparent to me that REAL ID solves a real problem.

Who said anything about REALID solving the national ID problem? We need to replace SSNs with a modern identity system.

Ok. Why do you say so? What would be the benefit?

I don’t believe for one second that you don’t already know, but ok here you go.

https://www.ssa.gov/fraud/#:~:text=How%20to%20report%20fraud....

Thanks for the reference. Your idea is that maintaining an official national database of people, linked to driver's licenses, would make it harder to commit fraud; is that right?

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.

Nope. As I’ve said other places in this thread we should replace the social security card and number with a modern identity system.

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.

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