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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think people are against it

Every time national ID gets moderately serious discussion it is revealed very clearly that yes, the people are against it.

RealID—which was simply national standardization of state issued ID (when used for a variety of important purposes) had intense resistance, too—and its the closest policy to national ID that has passed.

Social Security identifiers are not ID for the person, and anyway were adopted nearly a century ago at a moment of higher-than-current trust in the federal government.

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It would help if the federal government didn’t show itself to abuse ID databases every time it gets ahold of one.

I don’t see how we could develop a national ID in an environment of such low trust (bidirectionally). You need a government that’s responsive to citizens and obeys constitutional guardrails, and citizens who trust the government to protect their best interests. We haven’t had that since the prior century (and last century the government was still breaking our trust, it just didn’t make the news).

People are against national IDs because of privacy, not racism like a previous comment in this thread suggested

People are against requiring certain types of IDs to vote as racism or other forms of voter suppression because it may cost money to get those IDs or be very very hard to do so, when there are other methods to authenticate a person for voting

Those are two separate issues and complaints.

Just to add a bit. In a few different places in the US I've had multiple ID offices within easy driving (or bus) distance and wait times ranged from short to annoying but bearable.

When I lived near the ghetto in a different state I had roughly 2 choices, one 30 minutes out and the other over an hour (by car without traffic). Bus? Hah! Have fun. Arriving at the nearer of the two within an hour or so of opening in the morning there was already a multi-hour line for service.

Don't worry though, there's definitely not any sort of institutional racism behind the various efforts to require certain forms of ID to vote. /s

before you could get a social security card replaced online I lived in a poor area and getting a replacement took most of the day between getting there and sitting in an awful waiting room for hours... god forbid you forgot something or they rejected your proof of identity and you had to do it all over again

real id is also a massive pain in the ass, which is probably the bigger issue

give people a moderate benefit to do it, like a tax credit, and I think you'll find the majority of people hold their beliefs not so rigidly

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