EDIT: I am being hyperbolic here, but the second reply to my first comment was doing exactly this. We can't have this database because of the Nazis.

Also I'm not asking for a database including every possible detail about a person. I see no reason why something like race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or an number of other traits should be recorded. But a simple database with names, DOB, most recent address, a national id, etc would be extremely helpful.

"Both Mayor Karrer and Bishop Chrysostomos were quickly summoned to appear before the German Commandant, where they were ordered to immediately prepare the list of all the Jewish residents of Zakynthos. ... In a great display of courage and defiance to the powerful occupiers of Greece, the mayor and the bishop handed a simple piece of paper to the Nazi commander. On that scrap of paper, only two names were written: Mayor Loukas Kerrer and Bishop Chrysostomos."

https://greece.greekreporter.com/2020/01/25/the-unimaginable...

"In the book, published in 2001, Black outlined the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data."

I always find it strange how people consider the possibility of certain events far-fetched to the point of irrationality that have already happened.

Would the Holocaust have happened without IBM's participation?

Would the Holocaust have happened if punch cards were banned?

Would the Holocaust have happened if the Nazis didn't have census data?

The answer to those questions is an obvious yes. These logistical obstacles would have been nothing but a mild inconvenience for the Nazi death machine.

Someone with some sort of identity and address should be able to withdraw your bank account until proven guilty?

I think that's what people are suggesting maybe voting should have.

We certainly could have decently secure elections without ID. Like this: You show up to vote in person, a good photo is taken, and you say who you are. That info is then made public. Political parties and other interested groups can sift through the photos, maybe with an AI, to find any crime.

It's almost perfect. The main trouble is that fraud detection happens after the voting, so a person who doesn't fear prison can do as desired.

There are two possible kinds of voter fraud (both extremely rare), "retail fraud" (i.e. individual voters) and "wholesale fraud" (i.e. bulk fraud). Voter ID laws mostly "fix" a non-existent problem of individual false votes with the express intent of discouraging votes. The real problem you want to fix is "wholesale fraud" which means securing the whole system from voting machines (which should be open-source and paper-audited) to how votes are tallied. Think about it. If you were going to steal votes would you go to all the trouble to forge or hijack individual votes or would you bribe someone to flip a couple of digits at a county office?

Of course, a trustworthy system includes how mail-in votes are tracked and verified but that is a well-understood problem working well for thousands and thousands of absentees, military personnel and whole states full of people who have voted that way regularly for decades.