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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The United States doesn't have a central registry of citizens. New births are supposed to be recorded by local officials, in about 3000 different jurisdictions, and they're only recorded locally. Many of those local jurisdictions are operated poorly, and in some cases they have refused to issue certificates of birth based on race, or other personal grudges held by officials. So we simply aren't in the position to issue such identifiers, and in particular we can't assume that a person without traceable documentation isn't a citizen.

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The social security administration does have a central database of essentially everyone born in the US after 1986, when a law was passed that required you to provide the SSN of anyone you claimed as a dependent on your taxes. As a result essentially every child born in the US is issued an SSN along with their birth certificate.

> after 1986

Enumeration at birth was piloted in three states starting in 1987, made available to all states in 1989, and more or less in use everywhere by 1997 ... Needing an SSN for taxes is the motivation (or vice versa) but implentation of the tax change happened before implementation of enumeration.

Also, it should be noted, parents can opt out of enumeration at birth. The child certainly doesn't have input into that decision.

Medical professionals are generally legally obligated to report births, but not all births happen with medical supervision.

I was in college around 2000. Some of my fellow students had no way to obtain an official birth certificate as the county records had been lost in a flood or a fire or something.

Older generations also have the legacy of Jim Crow. Birth registration rates in 1940 in some states was close to 80%. [1].

If you're born today and don't have a birth certificate, it's a giant PITA and your parents will likely end up getting your birth retroactively documented. Maybe when they want to claim you for taxes; maybe to enroll you in school.

If you were born in 1940 and didn't have one, you probably just made do... When 24% of the children in Arkansas didn't get a birth certificate, everybody is going to be fine with you not having one.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1527492/?page=3 (paper from 1943)

> and in some cases they have refused to issue certificates of birth based on race, or other personal grudges held by officials.

Just to be clear for our international friends, this is basically as unheard of. "In some cases" you could say well in some cases of murder someone is a cannibal too. It's a big country with over 340 million people under one roof. Shit happens.

No, it was typical of the Jim Crow South. Black mothers were not permitted in hospitals, and county clerks refused to register home births. It was all part of the system of oppression.

We don't live in the Jim Crow South anymore - you're making an extreme stretch here to try and paint a picture that isn't accurate. My point stands.

Your point is laying in a ditch bleeding to death. There are loads of people alive today who personally suffered from Jim Crow. These practices continued right through 1968, and were revived in Texas between 2013 and 2016.

No it's not. It's alive and well and just bought a new house.

Stop fear-mongering. One person doing something wrong one time does not constitute any sort of noticeable or wide-scale practice and the fact that if such an event occurs it makes national news and is fixed goes to show that the public is opposed to these practices, they are exceptionally rare.

Or perhaps there are "some cases" of voter fraud too ;)

There are about 600,000 American citizens alive today who lack traceable documentation of their birth due to Jim Crow policies.

We have plenty of naturalized immigrants with no traceable documentation of their birth because they grew up in the middle of nowhere.

Somehow this wasn't a problem for them, while whites-only water fountains still live rent-free in your mind.

Following your logic, no problem is solvable until you have eliminated all potential issues and outliers. No startups would ever get off the ground with that attitude.

I'm all for solving problems, but I am not for committing a major disenfranchisement under cover of solving a non-problem. People who want to just ram through voter ID laws without solving the problem of undocumented citizens can't be treated as serious members of society.

Maybe you're not helping to solve this problem and you're just making it worse by overstating the problem and causing others to argue over whether there is even a problem?

> People who want to just ram through voter ID laws without solving the problem of undocumented citizens can't be treated as serious members of society.

Maybe we want to be more like Europe with IDs from birth and to use them for all government activities.

Who are you to be the arbiter of who is a serious member of society?

> We have plenty of naturalized immigrants with no traceable documentation of their birth because they grew up in the middle of nowhere.

Sure, because the documentation required used to be less.

When I was first getting my driver's license, you could establish your identity by having a birth certificate or some sort of vouching process. These days, you need a birth certificate.

It would be hard to immigrate today without a birth certificate, in part because it would be hard to get a passport without it, and it's hard to enter the country without a passport. Countries where record keeping was historically poor tend to have more accessible ways to obtain a passport without a birth certificate... A passport is sufficient proof of birth in an immigration file, and a certificate of naturalization is sufficient proof of citizenship, so a birth certificate isn't explicitly necessary.

This exaggeration is why we can't have universal digital ID or resilient voter fraud protections — which is what the original question was by the way. Do you also believe voter fraud is unheard of and never happens?

> Do you also believe voter fraud is unheard of and never happens?

I believe it's more rare than citizens without documentation of birth.

If you want to tie a 'universal' ID to a birth document when birth documentation is not universal, you need to lead with a proposal for how to actually make it universally accessible, including to those without documentation of birth.

This was something I fully realized when I got married. Where is the official record that we are married? It’s a piece of paper in a filing cabinet in a small town two states away. Unless I provide a copy of my license, there is no way for anyone to see for sure if I’m married except to go to every jurisdiction nationally and see if they have a marriage license that matches my info. You could try to infer it from something like tax returns, but the IRS has never actually validated that I’m married. They just take my word for it unless they have a reason to be suspicious.

If one or both of the two who just got married wants to change their name? The process is downright bizarre. There is no central name database you go update. You just send off forms to a bunch of places saying “this is my name now,” some with a copy of your marriage license.

Very strange system IMO.

Strange, but a little more decentralized and a little more "free", isn't it?

Why go through some centralized, hackable database, wait in line, and maybe get told to go away by some nameless official making minimum wage to update your last name when you can just decide to start using it and that's your prerogative? "I go by this, you don't get to decide". "My gender is this: it's not up to you to decide". I think it's something worth debating whether or not these kinds of things should even have anything to do with the government. I think there are good reasons, but I can certainly see very well-reasoned and principled arguments against the government being involved in some affairs like this.

Anyone can request their birth certificate in the jurisdiction of recording. There is absolutely no mechanism by which a request for that documentation could be refused because of someone’s race or a grudge.

What do you mean no mechanism? People can just say no? What I think you mean is that they’re are mechanisms today to combat folks saying no, but nothing stops (only punushes) people from saying no.

It’s a lot harder these days given the 60 years of progress

10 years ago we had 50 years of progress but in 2026 we're back down to zero progress.

You might be back down to zero progress and if that’s true you have my genuine sympathy. I look around and all I see is great progress everywhere. I don’t care much about social politics though. People being mad at each other about whatever offense is popular today just doesn’t register with me.

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