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Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

The Federal government has several central registries. The social security database for example knows which socials belong to citizens and which do not. The IRS database another as are the passport and visa databases.

The problem is that they aren't interconnected in any meaningful way by design so the bulk of the work gets pushed onto states. Real ID forced a lot of the states to get their act together but it's still a bit of a goat rodeo in places.

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Just to add to this, not only does the federal government have, for example, SSNs, but, e.g., in my state, supplying a SSN (which then gets verified with the federal government by the state government) is one of the ways in which you can prove citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote.

There's also birth certificates, which are state-based databases, AFAIK, so there is that route too, and that process is more along the lines of how we're a federation.

(& for voter registration, probably the most common method, at least IME, is to bootstrap that from your state license/ID; since those are generally REAL IDs now, most individuals would provide birth cert and SSN, since that is the most broadly fulfillable requirement of REAL ID.)

I'd say it's more than a technical problem. The States have primary responsibility for regulating voting, and do not seem at all interested in handing that over to the federal government. Even if it is just to get access to databases (which I assume they already have anyway if they want it).

Yes, and Social Security number is used as universal identifier today because it's the only thing available, it was never intended as such. There's a long history of resistance to central data collection in the US.

None of those registries is comprehensive, even if they're literally all joined together, and the only one coming close to it SSA. IRS and passports is are particularly nasty ones to rely on because you'd systematically disenfranchise specific demographics like young adults, poor people, etc.

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