Here in Sweden, everyone's address has to be registered with the Tax Agency. In their (securely authenticated by digital ID which can only be obtained using photo ID) online services you can choose to disallow changes of your registered address which are not made digitally to prevent this kind of thing.

Personally I have this turned on, because I'm conscious that every piece of information you'd need to send a fake address change notification for me is either public or easily obtainable with a call to the Tax Agency, which is far from reassuring.

That system would also allow us to completely get rid of our horrendous voter registration system, and make universal voting a reality.

The failures of the US voter registration system are deliberate, targeted disenfranchisement.

It would. In fact, Sweden has no “voter registration” per se, everyone who is registered as living here just gets a voting card in the mail before the election, I did earlier this year. (I only moved to Sweden this year and had no idea how to register to vote, turns out I don't need to!)

It's not great for privacy though, so I understand the resistance of the US and the UK to it. Mind you, the US wouldn't have to make the whole thing public like Sweden does for… reasons.

What if you have like 10 addresses? Can you vote 10x?

One registered main address per person, though you can register an additional “special post address” if you want to get your mail somewhere other than where you sleep for an extended period of time. You can't vote twice even if you did get two cards, you have to show ID (which I dislike, but it's at least relatively easy to obtain here) and your name is crossed out on the voter list once you've voted.

Lots of countries use the tax system to automatically sign up voters. Obviously this doesn't catch all potential voters - the people who don't file taxes because they have no income are likely a lot of the most disenfranchised individuals - but it gets you 90% of the way there. In Canada, whenever you file your taxes you have a box to tick 'automatically share my information with federal and provincial elections authorities'.

While it's administered by the Swedish Tax Agency, what Sweden has is actually a general population registration system that everyone* has to be in and which is used across the entire government.

*Asylum seekers and various types of temporary residents and such are not technically considered to be in the population register, though they are usually still in fact in the database, just with less information and a flag saying they don't count

Except in the USA, voting is constitutionally a state thing, not federal.

Federal laws, oversight. Local administration.

https://www.eac.gov

Cue the fever dreams whenever anyone merely suggests we harmonize, normalize the details. As if predictable standards for signature verification will inevitably lead to a military coup.

Even if that were entirely true, which it isn't, the Constitution is not fixed (except maybe the part about equal representation in the Senate, and there's a two-step trick to change that, too.)

People have been abusing this already https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-up...

The thing that stunned me about mail forwarding in the US is that it's free. There's as little verification here in Canada as in the US, but it's a pretty pricey service (minimum ~$60 depending on length of time) which naturally rate-limits fraud attempts.

Oh it's "Free" in the normal way. In that they sell your new address to marketers. I stopped using it years ago when I moved and then started getting catalogs for what felt like every business out there.

It struck me how easy it would be to get someone else's social security card this way: with the information from the Equifax breach, you have all the data you need to request a replacement card online, and by forwarding their mail you can get the card when it arrives.

It's always been easy to commit crime, it's just harder to get away with them, and luckily most people don't want to commit crimes (and then another percentage don't think the risk is worth the reward -- hence deterrence) . In this case, anything related to stealing someone else's mail is an insta-felony.

Last time I got social security cards, they were printed on cardstock with absolutely no security features. They would be trivial to counterfeit, if you had the number to begin with. It's amazing that they are accepted as a form of ID to get e.g. a passport.

They may be one form of ID required. (And I'm not sure that's even the case.) They are certainly not sufficient. You need proof of citizenship. You need some form of government-issued ID.

I haven't personally had a social security card in many decades. For the first time in I don't know how long, I do need to provide some form of proof of SSN to get a RealID drivers license renewal but last year's W2 is sufficient for that.

Yeah not required, but accepted. And not sufficient by itself. Birth certificate is good to prove citizenship and those appear to be easily forgeable also, at least the ones I've seen.

It's all a tradeoff. As a passport holder, a homeowner, and an employed person who gets a W-2, it only took me a few minutes to round up suitable documents to get a RealID-compliant drivers license renewal. But I'm sure it's more difficult for many. Some level of fraud is probably an acceptable cost for not making identity hard to prove for a significant slice of the population.

not in CA? the dmv lady told me i had to have my physical SSN card (which incidentally wasnt listed as a requirement on their website :| )

Apply for a replacement card and wait seven months for it to arrive is more like it...

That's my experience after hand delivering the form to the SS office so it would be quick.

Took me less than 2 weeks this spring, everything submitted online.