Hacker News Reader

Comment by iterance | Hacker News Reader

26 million Americans lack valid government-issued IDs, and of this 26m, minority groups comprise the vast majority.

https://bluenotary.us/how-many-american-citizens-don-t-have-...

Wow I was surprised by this figure, so I tried to find the source everyone quotes. It appears to be a 2006 telephone survey of 987 randomly-selected voting age citizens that were then weighted for an underrepresentation of race (so perhaps not that accurate). Anecdotally, I work in a safety net hospital and it is really rare for someone to come in without ID, which is why those numbers seemed so surprising to me...

https://www.brennancenter.org/media/6697/download

I could easily have missed a better or more recent study, so if anyone has one please post it!

The answer here is to make getting a government issued ID a straightforward matter and a national priority.

I cannot think of another significant country that hasn't had this figured out for decades.

Pretending that government IDs are super duper hard to give out is a time-honored American tradition.

After all, imagine if the government had a database with every person's name in it! You'd have like 300 million rows? Nobody's built a computing machine that could do that. And then how would you get the cards to people? You'd have to send out horses and buggies to every corner of the nation. And where would you find enough coachmen to do that, and roads to drive the coaches on???

No, clearly it's unpossible.

So we have to reserve the use of government IDs for really important things, like checking if you can buy cold medicine, and voting must remain insecure.

Government IDs are not a solved problem, and you don't seem to have even tried to consider the issues involved. The key distinction between voting and cold medicine is that you have a right to vote, but not to buy cold medicine. So if you lost your ID, or it's expired, it is not an option to just say "that sucks, I guess you can't vote now".

In fact, as a rule, ID is reserved for things that aren't important, because it is a point of failure.

Yes, only advanced countries like India can give everyone an ID. The US is too poor and backwards to give everyone a plastic card.

Do you think citizens of India experience no problems as a consequence of this, or is it just too exciting to be sarcastic on the internet?

Oh, wait, it must be the latter, because finding problems with India's government ID scheme takes five seconds: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/21/n...

The point of India requiring identification for benefits is to prevent waste and fraud. And given the number of poor people in India, and the limited amount of money they have to help them, it seems like quite a good thing to do so.

Identifying people is not hard, even for the poorest countries, and it's quite easy to do with modern technology. There is no good-faith reason to oppose it, any more than there is to oppose driver's licenses.

Did you read the article I linked? You keep saying this is an easy thing to do, but don't seem to acknowledge any of the problems it causes. It is not easy to identify people. It is easy to identify people with 99% accuracy. If the remaining 1% are unable to access society, that is an unacceptable risk.

Consider for instance the people who currently exist, don't have government ID, and don't have an accurate record of their birth. Such people exist. Should they just die, or something?

If you don't have a birth certificate, there are other ways to get an ID card. Immigrants do the US do it all the time. Pretending this is some unsolvable problem is ridiculous. It's like saying we can't collect taxes because it's impossible to identify people. When the government needs money, suddenly it's very possible to identify everyone and send them bills. Funny how that works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com