The left have been opposing voting requiring identification (on the grounds that it discriminates against those without it) for years. Even if they brought in national identification, they wouldn’t make it necessary for voting.

> The left have been opposing voting requiring identification (on the grounds that it discriminates against those without it) for years.

The left is worried that any ID scheme would be used to disenfranchise voters. Studies have shown that requiring an ID does not impact voter turnout for the most part, but we only need to look towards voter registration rules to see how the system can be gamed to prevent people to vote. Some states allow same day registration while others require 30 days, etc... I could think of similar rules around voter ID to add another hurdle to voting.

Shouldn't that be an issue they could meet half way on in order to get national identification implemented? Here we have an hook for which the right could get behind, and the benefit of national identification is very clear for all that time between elections.

It would indeed discriminate against those without it, but then a national identification is given to everyone who has a right to vote. One is directly linked to the other. In countries with national id you have to have the card if you want to buy alcohol, buy tobacco, drive, go to the doctor, get social security, banking, and many other regular stuff which people need to do multiple times between elections. If it something people need daily, they will have gotten it before the election.

Then make it free of charge and offer a version for illegalized people to carry.

I'm not American, so this comment confuses me. Why would illegal immigrants be allowed to vote or carry an official government-issued ID?

It comes up when there’s services illegal immigrants will use anyway and you want it to be done properly. For example, you want illegal immigrants to still have a valid driver’s license and insurance as the alternative isn’t “no illegal immigrants” but instead just a generally a society that functions less well (and in the case of driving more costly and less safe).

Yep. This is also why e.g. Portugal has decided to give all persons in the country, no matter immigration or other status, the right to free-of-charge coronavirus tests and treatments without threats of deportation or whatever - simply because the risk and follow-up costs of illegalized persons spreading around coronavirus are higher than any potential benefit.

They wouldn't, it's just deliberate confusion. If an arm of the government knows someone is there illegally they're meant to report them for deportation or other handling, not offer them infrastructure and rights, but in the USA the problem of illegal immigration has reached such scales that a large part of the left basically advocates for giving up on border enforcement of any kind. They don't really campaign directly to abolish borders because it would raise obvious and difficult questions, instead they campaign against enforcement: arguing for a world in which immigration rules exist but anyone who follows them is effectively playing a mug's game.

>They wouldn't, it's just deliberate confusion. If an arm of the government knows someone is there illegally they're meant to report them for deportation or other handling, not offer them infrastructure and rights,

You forgot the obvious middle ground, milk them for every penny.

If we had multiple classes of IDs you'd see every damn government transaction that requires ID come with a surcharge or different fee schedule for people using the variant that can be obtained without being a legal immigrant because those people can't complain.

> but in the USA the problem of illegal immigration has reached such scales that a large part of the left basically advocates for giving up on border enforcement of any kind

I'm not even an American, I only have a massive dislike against borders that let money and goods flow unimpeded, but not people. The economy, the government, the system should serve the people - not the other way around.

Besides: the official immigration rules of the US are screwed up beyond any reasonable hope for repair (and remember, the original idea behind US immigration policy as to take in everyone as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty!). If one cannot repair or replace a broken system, it is wise to work around it instead of keeping up bullshit - and yes, giving up on enforcement is one such strategy.

That's actually not that wise a strategy. Think of it like tech debt. Working around a bug can be useful if there's genuine time pressure. If you're doing it because you don't think you can fix it, or worse, haven't convinced other people there's any bug at all, then it is inadvisable to keep doing that in the long run.

There are good reasons why the rules for people are different to those for goods and capital. However, you may note that Trump specifically is also in favour of tariffs i.e. impeding the flow of goods. Via FATCA the USA also practices an obscure form of capital controls.

I don't know if getting into a debate about the merits of borders is a great idea for this thread, but, consider at least the following things:

1. Historically people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it). The world in 1800 was a world of sprawling empires. Passports didn't really exist in their modern form. Borders were weak or non-existent. In the past 200 years the number of countries has gone up drastically, often because people fought against those empires for the rights to create a smaller, more localised nation that would be better attuned to their local needs and cultures.

Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?

2. The world at the time of the Statue of Liberty was rather different to the world of today. For one, relatively few people could actually reach the US to do that sort of immigration. The arrival of cheap air travel fundamentally changes the equation for borders and immigration rules, as the flows of people involved are so much larger.

3. Culture is a real thing, a describable thing. The left exhalts it and upholds the benefits of a diversity of cultures. But in practice, cultures don't always co-exist peacefully. In Europe countries are resurrecting internal borders (e.g. Sweden did this just a few days ago) in the wake of yet more Islamist terror attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher that was trying to teach French values of tolerance and freedom of expression. Presumably you're aware of this story. As a consequence even Macron, who is as global-elite-anti-borders as they come, has had a sudden 'conversion'. The left has no coherent answer to how to sustain the values of 'enlightenment liberalism' that they hold dear in the face of large-scale immigration from cultures that doesn't share those values, nor tolerate them.

The left is losing this argument despite that borders seem retrograde, are inconvenient, and so on, because it hasn't yet found any coherent tradeoffs or solutions for the problems that prompted them in the first place. Indeed nobody has: the right doesn't even try. But the left is simply ignoring them and campaigning against the infrastructure of enforcement, which is a childish approach. A similar problem can be seen in the USA with respect to the police: campaigning against the existence of a thing that creates problems, without any answer to how to address the problems lack of that thing would create. It's this kind of anti-tradeoff thinking that eventually led me to abandon the left. It's OK to recognise that a situation is unsatisfactory, yet also recognise that you don't know of an alternative tradeoff that's clearly better.

Small nitpick : "people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it)"

Well people have fought and died for many many stupid pointless things so it hardly constitutes an argument in favour of it. People have fought and died for conquering other's people land, to enforce the "true" religion, for money, for glory...

"Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?"

The more wrong, the more stubborn. More seriously : This a a very abstract reasoning. How do you apply it to WWI? What did "people" want then? Did it matter what they wanted?

It's really not that abstract. Phrased another way, would you want the world to go back to a state where the sun never set on the British Empire? Most people wouldn't, including most Brits, even though it was a large free trade zone (the "Imperial Preference"). There are more borders now, but that's offset by the benefits of localism. The great empires were not famous for their love or respect of local cultures.

WW1 was a good example of where a lot of those countries came from. The empires of the day were very large, not many countries, and the people running the German/Austro/Hungarian/Ottoman empires thought that was great and maybe they should reduce the number of borders in the world a bit more. They were defeated and in the aftermath a lot of new countries sprang up, for instance, the modern concept of countries didn't really exist in North Africa/Arabia until the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

And the argument about people from other cultures not always mixing well isn't abstract. That is a lesson being learned in blood. The killer of Paty was an illegal immigrant, that's why Macron is suddenly pro-borders.

The point is, the modern left treats borders as some unspeakable evil, but never make any kind of intellectual argument against them, probably because the moment you do try to grapple with this issue intellectually and the history of where this system came from it becomes complex. Probably also because borders are an aspect of localism and the left historically is a globalist ideology. So instead they just attack the infrastructure and skip the whole thought process entirely. It's anti-intellectual.

> Practically every other country in the world has national identification

That surprised me (I don't have an ID card here in Australia, nor did I in the UK), so I looked it up :

"A number of countries do not have national identity cards. These include Andorra, Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Samoa, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan. Other identity documents such as passports or driver's licenses are then used as identity documents when needed. However, governments of Kiribati, Norway, Samoa and Uzbekistan are planning to introduce new national identity cards in the near future. Some of these, e.g. Denmark, have more simple official identity cards, which do not match the security and level of acceptance of a national identity card, used by people without driver's licenses.

A number of countries have voluntary identity card schemes. These include Austria, Belize, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Saint Lucia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document#National_pol...

p.s. I don't have a passport, driver's licence, mobile phone, or credit cards but still manage OK for ID :-)

I did notice that on wikipedia but statement like "voluntary identity card schemes. These include ... Sweden" and it lost the sight of the forest for the trees.

If you can't go to the doctor, can't buy products in stores that have an 18+ requirement, can't vote, can't drive, can't travel, can't buy a train or buss ticket, can't get social security unless you fight with bureaucracy for several years and still likely loose, can't have an bank account, can't buy a card at a swim/gym, well, home much of a voluntary scheme is that? I guess there is voluntary, and then there is voluntary. In a similar way its voluntary to have an bank account but you can't pay rent, get social security money, get paid (by most companies), buy products in what seems to be the majority of stores, or travel by buss/train/plane unless you got a bank account. It is voluntary in terms that you will not end up in jail if you don't have it, but living without is made extremely difficult.

It is interesting that in UK, the requirement for ID card during elections depend on where you live. Northern Ireland must have it, while England, Wales or Scotland do not require it.

Going back to the Scandinavian countries, Norway which do not have an national identity cards do still require a photo ID when voting. Instead of a national id card they use their passport, driver license or banking ID, in which case one of those serve the purpose of authentication.

The UK doesn't have national identification. The government tried to bring it in a decade or more ago but it was shot down by the successful no2id campaign. The UK also doesn't have a significant problem with electoral fraud: like the US it has robust processes in place to ensure that its (admittedly less than perfect) electoral system is implemented fairly[0], correctly, and with integrity. This doesn't depend on national identification so I'm not sure why you're implying it should be a prerequisite for holding elections.

[0] Fairly within the constraints of its framework: you can obviously argue about first past the post versus alternative vote versus proportional representation versus a collegiate system as being the fairest system, but that's a separate question.

When I voted in the UK I didn't feel like it was very secure at all. At the most, you only have to show a proof of address IIRC, but anyone can snatch a bill from your mailbox and vote in your place. Or you can take your grandma's and vote for her etc.

Actual MPs disagree with you about that:

https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/there-is-wides...

"I believe the overwhelming majority of my constituents would be shocked if they knew the extent of corrupt election practices and voter fraud which happen each time there is an election. I want open and lawful elections, upholding the principle that every entitled voter should have one vote, and cast it freely."

The system is wide open to abuse. The article goes into a large variety of schemes. There's a risk that in future the UK may face a similar outcome as the USA. The only way to really fix this is to reign in postal voting significantly to only those who strictly need it - and I say that as someone who votes by post (because I live abroad).

> There's a risk that in future the UK may face a similar outcome as the USA.

What outcome is that exactly?

Are you alleging that there has been widespread electoral fraud in the USA? Because if that is what you're suggesting you need to drop the euphemisms and point to the hard evidence.

I am aware of precisely zero solid evidence of material levels of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and zero evidence that postal ballots have caused any fraud-related issues.

If that's not what you're saying then what exactly are you saying?

The outcome is "an election in which a large number of people don't believe it was a fair contest".

What matters is people's belief that the process has integrity. By its very nature, most vote fraud is hard to prove as due to the privacy protections in the system, it will boil down to people saying "I saw fraud happening with my eyes". And there are people in the US making that exact allegation right now under oath. I take no position on whether they're correct or not, merely observing that polls show the number of people who don't believe the election was run properly is dramatically higher now than it was before election day (amongst Republicans, Dems of course love it and are sure there's no fraud at all).

It would be interesting to see if he actually reported those cases to the relevant authorities. The Electoral Commission takes voting fraud pretty seriously:

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-w...

“We have received reports” is the same BS the Trump folks are trying to pull with their “voter fraud hotline” today.

You’ve posted an op-ed that offers no actual evidence.

The article says that in one case they can evidence it, but an individual MP isn't a police force. At any rate, the reasons behind the design of elections is to pre-emptively block fraud because proving it retroactively is hard. Hence the private ballot box, polling stations, the reluctance to use computerised/internet based voting and so on. People have to believe the system is inherently robust. Why, because what sort of hard evidence could be generated for those sorts of problems, and at what scale? People registering with their friends/family addresses so they can tip votes outside where they live is inherently hard to obtain large-scale evidence of.