We desperately need a national ID card. Social security was never designed for this purpose and it's terrible for it. Drivers license requires having access to a car and some way to learn how to use it.

If we're going to have a national ID card, then it needs to be:

1) Free. Period. Otherwise you're going to disenfranchise poor people who can't afford even $50 to get an ID.

2) Universally accessible. If we're going to require it, then we need to make sure everyone has one, from a little old lady living 100 miles from civilization in Montana, to the homeless living in camps near San Jose.

There's plenty of countries where neither of those is true, but the voting system requires a national ID and has better outcomes by any reasonable metric than the US.

So you don't really need those things, but they may be proxy issues for other hard-to-solve issues.

I am not very familiar with the systems other countries use so I am genuinely curious which ones you are referring to here and whether they are comparable to the US. The US has a centuries long history of laws designed to make it harder for "undesirables" to vote. The US's racial and socioeconomic makeup and its history of oppression of those groups makes this a much more contentious issue than some other countries that historically have been very homogeneous.

E.g. in Iceland you can vote with a driver's license, a passport or a national ID. Those cost, respectively, $45, $110 and $40. Although I see now the first national ID you get issued in your life is free, but if you ever lose it you pay the fee to renew it.

It's the same sort of thing in most European countries, you need to prove who you are, and usually doing that costs some one-off nominal fee. Voting is always going to carry some cost, whether that's money or in externalities imposed on voters.

I'm not saying Iceland and other European countries are "comparable to the US", I'm sure we could spend all day moving that particular goal post.

I was just pointing out that there's nothing wrong per-se with requiring ID to vote. I'm somewhat familiar with the US history on the matter, and realize that in practice, and I think uniquely in the US, it's a wedge issue that's historically been motivated by voter disenfranchisement.

But it's important to separate that practical concern about particular implementations from the very notion that having a national ID system and using it for things like voting could never work.

I'm curious about how this works in practice. If you're a tourist visiting the US during a vote can you just show up to a voting polling station and cast a vote? If you don't have to show your ID what happens from the time you walk up to a polling station until you cast your vote and walk out again?

> I'm curious about how this works in practice. If you're a tourist visiting the US during a vote can you just show up to a voting polling station and cast a vote? If you don't have to show your ID what happens from the time you walk up to a polling station until you cast your vote and walk out again?

In most states, you must be registered to vote before election day. In those states, non-citizens who attempt to vote will be asked their name and address before they are handed a ballot. When they are found to not be on the registration list for that polling precinct, they will not get a regular ballot. They may be given the chance to cast a provisional ballot, but it will be thrown out during the counting process when evidence cannot be found that the person was eligible to vote.

The voter registration process has proven to be a highly effective means of preventing ineligible voters from voting. The exceptions tend to be when different government departments fail to communicate effectively to catch people registering in multiple places, or ineligible criminals attempting to register. Voter ID does not meaningfully improve the security against non-citizens voting.

> In most states, you must be registered to vote before election day.

Okey, so there's a list of people eligible to vote at a given polling station, but how do you you get on that list?

If there's no mandate to show ID do you just show up for registration and say your name is John Smith living at such-and-such St? The federal census is every 10 years so that claim can't be checked against that. Do local governments maintain their own name/address databases?

Are they ever going to say "we don't believe that you live here". What do you do then? Show up with a utility bill with your name on it?

In my state, registering to vote requires providing either drivers license number, showing ID, or something like utility bills as proof of address. The form asks if you're a US citizen but does not require you to submit documentation proving citizenship.

Upthread there's mention of "homeless living in camps near San Jose". How does someone without a driver's license or home (so no utility bills) register?

Claiming to be a citizen, or claiming to be someone you’re not, is voter fraud, and can lead to a decade or more in prison.

As it happens, essentially no one in the US commits voter fraud of this sort (the go in, vote as someone you’re not, kind. Ballot stuffing may or may not be a thing, or rigging of digital elections may be a thing).

The US also makes voting day be on a normal work days, it’s not a holiday or weekend, and people don’t get time off work to vote. There are often very long waiting lines to vote. So telling people they need an ID to vote leads to people actually being disenfranchised, in the US, if they just forgot their ID.

And again, actual voter fraud is so rare that it’s national news when someone is convicted of it (and people go looking for it often).

Iceland was the type of country I was thinking of when I wrote that comment. Iceland has a smaller population than any state in the US and smaller than over 50 cities in the US. It is also very homogeneous when it comes to race and socioeconomic attributes. I am sure that they have found an approach that works for them, but it is tough to use them as a model for the US. Either way, even a requirement for a $45 ID would be seen by many in the US as a poll tax which was outlawed by a constitutional amendment during the civil rights movement.

To answer your questions about voting in the US, everything varies by state/territory. All of them require you to register before you are allowed to vote. The deadline to register is usually weeks to months before election day. A few states allow you to register on election day and your vote won't be counted until your registration is confirmed. When you register (or in the lead up to the election) you are assigned a specific polling location. Many states have some sort of absentee or mail ballot that allows you to vote if you can't or don't want to physically go to a polling place. You have to be registered ahead of time to receive one of those ballots.

On election day you show up to your assigned polling place and tell them your name. The polling place will have a list of people eligible to vote at that location and will match your name to their list. You might be asked to sign next to your name on their list to confirm you voted and potentially confirm your identity. I have no idea if anyone really reviews the signatures. If your name isn't on the list, you may be given a provisional ballot and then there will be a process to investigate why you weren't on the list. Provisional ballots generally aren't counted unless a race is extremely close and a large percentage of those ballots end up being disqualified for various reasons.

An extremely determined tourist might be able to lie their way into filling out a provisional ballot but it wouldn't be counted because their eligibility wouldn't be confirmed. They could potentially impersonate a known eligible voter, but that would require them knowing the correct polling place, knowing that person has not yet voted, and be willing to commit an obvious fraud. The upside for committing that type of fraud is extremely low considering the effort that would be required to swing anything but the smallest elections. There is no real evidence that anymore than a handful of people attempt this type of thing during any election.

Neither of those points could possibly be a problem.

You’ve clearly never seen your local government at work.

I think tjoff was being sarcastic, but I'm not certain.

I'm not particularly informed on arguments for and against this, but shouldn't a national ID require some modicum of trust in the national government? In their ability to keep the database safe from bad actors, including Executives that fancy themselves dictators?

A national ID sounds like a terrible idea for this country right now.

The US doesn't have a national ID at least partly because of a revulsion toward the USSR "papers, please" restrictions on movement. The "lack of trust" in the national government has very little to do with database security.

We already have one. It's called social security and it's a procedurally generated 9 digit number that is vulnerable to series prediction among other things, and essentially can't be (or almost never is) regenerated if it's compromised.

It's a very poor system that was never designed for its current use. We have many of the downsides of a poorly implemented national ID and very few of the upsides. We need an actual purpose built national ID.

You can get an ID card that works as legal id but isn't a driver's license, but it still requires going to the DMV and burning at LEAST several hours, which isn't an option available to everybody.

And it often costs money, and it's often a lot of hassle, and sometimes the employees charged with making it available give false information on what's required to get it.

Some stats on Wisconsin, which is supposed to provide a free voter ID: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html

Why does it take that long? I had to get a PSC, Ireland’s not-a-national-id-we-promise, to apply for a driving theory test a while back (days afterwards, the requirement to have one for a driving theory test was dropped after public backlash). It took about 20 minutes, and that was only because the civil servant’s computer was being uncooperative.

It's slightly insane that we make people go to a physical location and derp around waiting for a piece of ID.

You should be able to handle this like you do getting a passport. Fill out the forms, get a proper picture taken, slap it in the mail, get your shiny new documents back in two weeks.

Counterpoint:

I filled out the forms to renew my passport and took them to my local post office. The only person staffing the passport desk refused to take my forms because I hadn't filled in the name of my employer. I pointed out that the website explicitly states that that field is optional, and that the website will not even allow you to print a form that doesn't pass its validation. She hallucinated that the field is optional only in the case that you have no employer.

So, I had to travel to a passport office. The desk there really wanted me to fill in the name of my employer, but at least they didn't refuse to take my perfectly valid form based on their own personal delusions.

You already have to have an ID to get a job. Who can't do this once in their life?

and what happens when the id expires or you change your address or you change your name or the id gets lost or destroyed?

This is a crisis created by local governments. The private sector could easily solve this problem, but that would require bureaucrats losing their power.

I'm sure their friendly neighborhood community organizer will charter a bus for them to get their ID cards. If they're citizens, there will be somebody who wants their vote badly enough to walk them through that process and even buy them a sandwich for their trouble.

Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. Community organizers have proven to be extremely effective at getting voters to the polls. If a preliminary step is for them to get them their card, I'm sure they won't flinch from that duty.

Transportation to a DMV office isn't the main limitation. Having the freedom to miss a day or two of work to spend waiting in line is a bigger problem, especially when those offices don't necessarily process non-driver ID cards on all ordinary business days.

> Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens.

The proper time to verify citizenship is during the registration process, when there's time to be thorough. You can't do a reasonable job of validating ID or checking that a person is only registered to vote in one place at the polling place.

I will support any system that insures that all voters have verified citizenship.

At what cost? Are you interested in ensuring that additional voting restrictions actually prevent more illegal votes than they prevent legitimate votes? What makes you think the base rate of non-citizen voting is even high enough to be a problem that can be addressed without invariably causing more harm than good?

Integrity of our system is important. It doesn’t need to be a partisan issue.

Sure, but how is any of that relevant to voter ID? If you really care about integrity of the voting system, then you should also care about prioritizing the problems that are real, easily exploited, and have the greatest potential for harm. Voter ID is largely a solution looking for a problem, with undeniable side effects of voter suppression. It's being made into a partisan issue not by its opponents but by the proponents who are unjustifiably elevating the issue above more important systemic election vulnerabilities.

Nonsense. We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that? You talk about conspiracy theories. This notion that there is this huge population of legal, eligible voters who are functioning in our society without ID is ludicrous.

But if you want to implement paper ballots across the board at the same time, or even 1st, than let's make that happen. As you say, any progress is better than none. Since you are obstructing voter id and not obstructing paper ballots (I assume), than by all means, let's do that first.

> We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that?

Ignoring for the moment how improper it is for you to take such a personally accusative tone: The voter ID opposition has been thoroughly justified by the lack of evidence that the problems it solves are real enough to need solving, and by the fact that even the slightest awareness of the context surrounding these voter ID proposals makes it clear that they are not good-faith attempts to make our elections more fair.

In short: nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.

> nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.

I would be pleased if you did not personally insult those who you are speaking to.

The lack of evidence is a farce, since any attempts to collect such evidence are met with stonewalling and refusal by democratically controlled local and state government.

In 2014, a study released by a team of professors from Old Dominion University and George Mason University estimated that approximately 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted In the 2008 presidential election. (Versus 56% of legal citizens voting)

As immigration reform becomes more and more of an issue, there is incentive for that 6.4 percent number to further increase, and indeed it may have in 2016, but that data is proving hard to pry loose. Since there are 11 million illegals in the US by the lowest estimate (high estimates are 20 million) this is not a non-problem.

As for the disenfranchisement canard. Even Nate Silver acknowledges it's non-validity. Silver has noted, this argument doesn’t make sense because the vast majority of adults in America hold some form of photo identification and states with voter ID laws offer qualifying documentation at minimal or no cost.

Turning ten people who have the right to vote away, to catch one cheater is a ten times worse violation of integrity then the converse.

Not letting a citizen vote is just as much voter fraud as a non-citizen voting. Except its worse, because it is performed by the state.

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It's in the realm of tinfoil hat and freakishly paranoid conspiracy theories that there's any meaningful amount of non-citizens voting. Feel free to design a system that meets the John Rawl's "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, such that the burden of obtaining such ID is equal among all. What would that really look like? If Joe Bob has to take 2 hours off work, without pay, to get ID, how do you get a Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos to go without pay for two hours? Charge them $3 million for their ID card? And if you do, is their burden really the same when they still take home $30 million that day, while Joe Bob lost $30 out of his $600 weekly pay, plus the $30 cost of the license or 10% of his weekly take home? And even if you charge ~$17 million for Warren's driver's license, his weekly take home is still $160+ million. So is that the same burden?

By the way, the single prosecuted case of voter fraud from 2016 I'm aware of, is a man in Colorado, who voted for his wife after she'd moved out of state. They're both citizens.

Obtaining an ID card can be as easy or as painful as our local governments decide it to be. Amazing, it’s the most painful I have ever experience here in California where the DMV borders on insanity. I would think such a progressive state would care more about the burden it places on its citizens than on maintaining tight control over the process but such is California.

I was able to schedule my DMV appointment in California and was in and out.

Congratulations. Did you wave goodbye to the huge crowds of visibly frustrated people who have been waiting for hours on your way out?

Yes, the core irony that the same people:

a) Want to make having an ID as a prerequisite for voting

and

b) Are deeply against any form of national ID card (or anything else that makes it cheap and easy to get an ID)

It's almost (almost) like they want to prevent poor people from cities (who don't need cars) from voting.

Who says it needs to be a federal (national) ID card?

Also it’s hard for poor people to get ID cards because our governments make the process hard and time consuming. It’s a manufactured and not inherent problem.

Where is it not cheap and easy to get an ID card?

It's harder than you think, and easy to find out how/why:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

The Real ID Act passed the House 368–58, and Senate 100-0, signed into law by Bush 2 in 2005. 54 of the nay votes were Democrats. While the law does not mean the federal government creates a domestic national ID, the federal government sets the standard for ID, and then requires that standard be used at federal facilities like TSA at airports, federal buildings, nuclear power plants and so on. So it in effect requires states produce the national ID card. Anyway, seemingly per usual, the U.S. invents the wheel multiple times, tries to standardize, grants many exceptions and extensions along the way, and in the end there are ~51 "standards".

You would think that tightly controlled democratic states such as California would make an effort to make IDs easier to get, but instead they create a bureaucratic nightmare which requires 6 hours of your day (visit to the DMV).

The state believes requiring IDs disenfranchises the poor. It’s actually the disfunctional state governments that do it.