Your thoughts are not old school at all. The Constitution initially left it up to the states to determine who was eligible to vote and most states restricted voting to white, male, property owners - thus requiring a deed of property to register. NJ was pretty progressive allowing women to vote if they had property.

Identification and Soviet papers are two completely different things. In the Soviet Union and in China until very recently even your travel was restricted by your papers. They weren't just identification, they literally defined where you could go. There is no comparison with a simple, national ID system like the one used in India.

Our voting system was largely based on community to enforce voting rights. Meaning you live a small town, everyone knows who you are, and if you aren't supposed to vote you won't get away with it because everyone knows everyone. Today even in small towns many people have no idea who their neighbors are.

Your notion on voting rights runs contrary to the concept of citizenship in general, is quite recent, and radical. There is nothing old school about it.

I believe the minimum criteria to vote is citizenship. To ensure that only citizens are voting, some paper, ledger, or row in a database must exist somewhere and a means to check that criteria must exist.

Oh and letting politicians decide after the fact whose votes count is recipe for disaster.