really? you can't imagine how buying booze is any different from voting?

I can't tell if you are suggesting that the standards for alcohol be higher than for voting or not? Because currently they are.

they're not higher. the federal government doesn't even care how old you are, let alone where you live or whether you are who you say you are. those standards are all locally mandated and locally enforced.

Sort of... The federal government passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act[1], showing they did care. Although they don't directly enforce drinking age mins, the carrot and the stick approach was used.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

i'm aware of this and you're talking past the point i made. federal restrictions are stricter on voting than they are on alcohol.

They require proof to buy alcohol. They do not to vote. the consequences are not the only part of "requirements".

who does? the federal government does not.

I think this is a frame of reference issue. The I buy beer at whole foods, someone checks my ID and won't sell it to me if I don't have one. If I vote via mail in ballot, I sign my name on a sheet of paper that arrives to an unsecured mailbox. Whatever the law that applies, as an end user, beer seems to be a more restricted product.

I'd wager voting (federal elections) kill way more people than Americans who die downstream of booze. Its just a question of locality, really.

I mean, I'm opposed to ID's to buy some of those things too. But thats my libertarianism speaking. Generally we have no strict ID requirements for those items, its up to the seller to verify age, which that can do by obvious appearance, or by carding the person. It's why you dont get carded all the time.

Driving requires a specific credential and is not relevant for this discussion.

Flying is another case, you do not need an ID to fly, there are provisions to fly without photo ID if you do not have one, they're just more time consuming and meant to be somewhat punitive.

My point is that it's incongruent. The reasons brought forth supporting an id-free voting system are absent when any policy that requires more government papers and over sight are put in place.

Generally, if you saw conservatives proposing policies that made ID available to everyone for no cost (like a free copy of their birth certificate and free passport card for every citizen), their opposition would look silly on this.

Instead, conservatives focus on the ID mandate, ahead of fixing the inherent supply issues. Indeed, while I still have objections after this issue is fixed, they're largely irrelevant to the political mainstream.

Generally I'm opposed to anything that smacks of 'papers place', and the government has a higher bar to need to confirm and record identity than John Q. Public (also I'd note, the examples you cited, generally do not record anything, they just verify age of purchaser).

It all boils down to some form of absurd partisanship.

> Generally, if you saw conservatives proposing policies that made ID available to everyone for no cost (like a free copy of their birth certificate and free passport card for every citizen), their opposition would look silly on this.

Or imagine if you saw Democrats proposing this?

Any group raising their money from small dollar donations has an incentive to do nothing. As soon as they accomplish something, their funding dries up.

Both are raising their money from large dollar donations. They also both accomplish plenty - bipartisan votes pass things in wealthy donors' interests.

The things that they do nothing on are "wedge" issues. The filibuster guarantees that those are the only things that can't get passed if Congress stays vaguely equally divided. Passing material improvements to average lives is no benefit to either side.

Everything you just described is a privilege, not a civic duty.