This would probably be considered “disenfranchising” because people would have a hard time keeping track of their public key and the process to recover it would involve having to take off work, transportation, etc.
Estonia wasn't even the first, Belgium was.
I think the problem that lots of people, including all the people involved in those companies, don't think that's a problem but a feature. Adds "jobs", GDP, filling their own pockets and a whole host of other "benefits" they're willing to look past any drawbacks in order to get.
Not for government services. The only problem is if the government makes it overly easy for private companies to integrate with and make use of the system. Pretty much no website except perhaps my bank or health care provider have any business collecting my PII.
It's worth pointing out that the point of contact for state IDs is the DMV, which is the butt of every government inefficiency complaint. If, instead, it was done at USPS offices or even by postal workers on their routes, no one would complain.
It's entirely about whether the burden is placed on the citizen to maintain their Constitutionally guaranteed rights or whether political agents can use the state to selectively burden neighborhoods, especially ones with no / badly performing DMV offices.
I always find DMV (or whatever your state's equivalent) inefficiency arguments to be hilarious. They're run extremely efficiently for the government. They suck use because of that (long wait times, most important stuff gets shipped by mail weeks later).
The point of the government doing it is that it has to be able to service those people who live maximally far from a DMV (say 60 minutes each way by car), who can't drive there, who have to weigh losing pay to take the time to travel there, who have below average intelligence, who are functionally illiterate (because Mississippi created A LOT of those before their recent education reforms), who "can't use technology", who forgot to bring whatever specific document qualifies for Real ID, etc.
There is a huge difference between a guaranteed Constitutional right that this country fought a Civil War for... and a privilege such as getting on a plane or driving a car.
Assume that I know everything you know about this topic and still arrived at a different conclusion.
It's real funny until they pass a law that says you need an ID to vote and then immediately close the only DMV anywhere near where you live specifically because they want to keep you and your neighbors from voting (https://www.yahoo.com/news/feds-called-investigate-alabama-d...)
Earlier this year, my license was expiring and I decided to get a Real ID. I was able to create an appointment on the Oregon DMV website. It was set for 10 AM. I got there at 9:50 and checked in. My name was called up at only a couple minutes after my appointment time. I gave my documents and paid, then was instructed to wait by the camera area for my picture. I had barely sat down when my name was called. They took my picture, and I was all set. I was out the door by 10:15. Pretty sure my ID then came in the mail only about a week later.
So when people talk about long waits, I don't know what they're talking about. Maybe their state just sucks.
When I lived in Colorado the smart move in Denver was to start lining up about an hour before the DMV opened (for driver licenses, car registration never had much of a line). Out in the mountains, I was able to just walk in just about anytime. The longest wait I had in the small mountain town I lived in was when the one lady working there was doing a driving test, and I had to wait 10 minutes for her to get back.
Living in Washington, they allow private businesses to register vehicles, so transferring a car was normally a 5 minute job. Never did bother to switch my DL, so can't comment on that.
Now I'm up in BC where vehicle and driver licensing is handled by the state owned insurance monopoly. Any agent, private or public, can register your car. You can get the licensing done at public insurance offices, or at provincial service centres that handle all sorts of business by appointment or walk in. It all works pretty well.
When I got my license they told me that if I had time it would be faster to drive down to the springs than to wait at the Denver office.
In Washington the DMV is split between licensing people and licensing cars/etc (2 locations), plus separate emissions testing locations. It's all contracted out with private companies providing staff and services. Last cycle, it took me over 3 hours to update my ID and registration.
Later, one of these places overcharged me on registration of a new car bought out of state. One near my last apartment in Seattle was running a credit card fraud scheme. Some may not have staff when you need them.
Turns out that when you support and fund the program, the government can do a pretty good job. You can, in fact, pay someone to care.
The government is efficient without qualification.
People just like to complain and Reagan was charismatic so we’re cursed with this government inefficiency meme. We’re programmed to repeat it even when providing counter examples.
The overwhelming majority of the waiting I do in life is at the hands of private organizations who are unwilling to invest in proper staffing.
There will no doubt be replies to the contrary but to them I say they have identified corruption, not inefficiency. When the government doesn’t work it is by choice.
The government has to (and should have to) provide the same service to everyone, everywhere. Businesses would never bother putting a DMV office in a small remote county because of cost, even if it was unfair and inconvenient to people living there. Government does do that, and it doesn't look great on a balance sheet.
Like I said, the USPS is in a much better position to be able to scale identity to the national scale.
That's because ours are all done by third party companies on contracts :P
You must have had better luck with post offices than I have. Having lived in a dozen states and used many different post offices, the vast majority is an utter nightmare. Between the rudeness and the apathy, I would much prefer the DMV (depending on the state)
Sure, you can get an ID cheap. Most of the time. But if all of your ID is lost (which can easily happen to the victim of a purse snatching) it's going to take time and money to fix the problem. And voter registrations are not supposed to be permitted to be challenged too close to the election. Not supposed to be doesn't mean it doesn't happen repeatedly, though. This scales much, much better than sending in fraudulent ballots. We find a handful of fraudulent ballots, often by Republicans trying to prove fraud is easy. 2016 and 2024 both had more people denied access by ID laws, challenges and the like than the margin of victory. And those missing votes would have skewed heavily Democrat.
Almost forgot: SAVE puts a very onerous paper trail on divorced women. They'll need copies of the paperwork changing back to their maiden name--something an awful lot of them don't have. I've already seen a variation on this with RealID. A mistake was made at my wife's naturalization, a hyphen crept into her name that didn't belong, went unnoticed for years. Even when it was discovered it was a so-what. Social security had an errant hyphen, everything else was as intended. No problem. Then RealID came along--and she had to do a legal name change in order to change her name to what her ID and passport said. Weeks and hundreds of dollars.
Denying legitimate voters is just as much fraud as permitting fraudulent ones. A system in which the the former happens at least 10,000x as often as the latter is not a good system.