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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
> 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?
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.