The state I live in (Arizona) requires proof your presence is authorized to get state ID. If you are a citizen, that means proof of citizenship. But then loop back to supreme court decision above.
That ruling doubles down on it being a state thing by saying leave citizenship (which is a federal thing) out of it. If a state creates for itself a catch-22, that is the states fault and is therefore the states responsibility to fix.
Arizona needs to stop shirking it’s responsibility to its residents and come up with a solution to this problem, just like virtually every other state has.
If SCOTUS says states can't require proof of citizenship for voter registration, how can they exclude non-citizens from voter rolls? The state hasn't created a catch-22; the federal judiciary has told the states that they effectively can't use citizenship as a requirement for voting.
I feel like I'm missing something here, because this can't be the state of things.
> We have a national ID issue which needs to be fixed.
What issue is this? Why do we need a national ID? What purpose would one serve? Plenty of Americans go through their lives just fine without any sort of federally-issued ID. Pretty much all you have to do is never travel outside the US, and many Americans don't.
Aside from the hundreds of other cost-and-convenience reasons, eliminating the SSN (and associated fraud) would be easily worth it on its own.
Even if it were true that plenty of people get through life without a federal ID, that doesn’t mean all do. As I have said other places in this thread, the rickety machinery of federal identity replication grinds up plenty of people.
>Arizona needs to stop shirking it’s responsibility to its residents
Can you tell me what you're referring to here?
What is that issue? It is not apparent to me that REAL ID solves a real problem.
https://www.ssa.gov/fraud/#:~:text=How%20to%20report%20fraud....
This was a genuine question. It's not obvious to me why it would matter which primary key people used in their customer databases, but fraud is also not something I worry about or really even think about.
Currently your SSN is your client secret, but it’s a terrible one and we should replace it with a more robust secret. I shouldn’t be able to steal your identity by knowing a short number with minimal entropy.
What IDs are you referring to and what’s the headache? Presumably one ID is a passport. From your first sentence, I would assume the second ID is a social security number, but how does it become “out of sync” with a passport?
Get a passport as a minor, change your name as an adult, realize SSA has your wrong bday, descend into bureaucracy hell as now both name and DOB don’t match.
While I am sure the bureaucracy surrounding such discrepancies is enormous, I’m not for sure I understand how it relates to a discussion about national IDs. A passport is effectively an optional national ID, so none of these issues would be solved by a national ID.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) issues IDs at the federal level, which are applied for using state or county issued birth certificates (as well as other ways). They sometimes make clerical errors. Those errors can propagate into other federal identity databases, such as the taxpayer record system operated by the Internal Revenue Service or the passport database operated by the Department of State.
The linkages between these systems are fragile or nonexistent, and if you are not careful about manually propagating changes between them you can end up in an inconsistent state which requires court action to rectify.
Passports are often used in lieu of social security cards because people are (correctly!) leery about using their SSN directly. I know people who have no intention of traveling internationally who have gotten passports because it’s extremely convenient to have a federally issued photo id.
I have neglected to get my state's real ID since it requires me to go into a location, which are soul sucking. Luckily, my global entry card is a Real ID. It only took two years to get that one. And when I had to go in for that ID, they didn't even check my driver's license or passport for ID. They just took my picture and that was it. Pretty poor due diligence.
Funnily enough I was able to fly without an ID when I lost my license--which was surprisingly hassle-free. But I had a hell of a time checking into my hotel.
You haven’t needed it since it’s such a bad ID that if you know the number you often don’t need to possess the paper.
You can also use a birth certificate to establish right to work, so yeah it wouldn’t be required.
Of course now I just use my passport, but like many Americans I didn’t have one for many years.
Eventually I was able to track down the underlying laws that the relevant rules were based on and call the head office in Charleston who put things right, but who knows what would've happened had I not been a native English speaker.
Some of this may have changed, it looks like "8 FAM 403.1-4(D)" would've been the rule that I needed back when I did this, and it does not appear to be currently classified, but lots of other rules still are. Point is, it may not be as simple as you'd think to "just" get a new passport.
What ID is that? If you're talking about a Social Security Card, that's not ID at all. I don't think I would call it "ID but not very good", even.
Ultimately there are a lot of people who go through life in the US who never have a federally-issued ID at all. Simply never traveling outside the US will do it for most people. And there are more people than you'd expect in the US who never leave the country.
Also agree re: voting: elections are administered by states, so a federal ID is just not even necessary here. States are perfectly capable of issuing ID, as we all know. (Granted, drivers licenses and non-driving state IDs usually don't have anything to say about citizenship status. A state-issued ID serves as authentication, not authorization, where voting is concerned.)
Why are you against having a good one?
`s/is/should be/`
If I have your social security card I can pretend to be you quite effectively as many people will accept it as an ID. They don’t care that you don’t think it is one. The ones that don’t will frequently take an alternative (read: derived) that I can get with just it.
> It doesn't contain evidence that can feasibly be used to prove…
Yes. We agree, it’s a bad ID.
Though don't actually know as I haven't had one in decades.
You do have one, or if you insist you were issued one, you just don’t possess it.
At one point the lifelock guy had something like 200 W.Va licenses since in the mid-aughts they didn’t actually check to see if that SSN had a license already.
W.Va license gets you a passport. Passport gets you anything you want.
The only thing standing between you and full-blown has-a-passport identity theft is your Social Security Card.
Edit: You can intuitively prove that everywhere doesn’t require a photo ID because some piece of ID has to come first.
The state of West Virginia will give you a (non-RealID) drivers license with a social security card and 2 pieces of mail. Card to prove your identity and mail to prove that name went with a W.Va address.
It’s an ID, issued by the Federal Government, and every American has one. Now that all the insanity and gymnastics are over can we please just make it better?
> I would still class them under "powerful fools"
Cool, but your opinion of them is irrelevant. They get to decide what forms of ID they’ll take, and they’ve decided to take this one.
> you could just write your name on an index card and use that instead
Of course you couldn’t, the rule is very clear that you can identify yourself with specifically a social security card. You’re the one pretending. Your insistence that it’s not an ID will be small comfort when someone fakes yours and used it to identify themselves as you to steal your identity.
Again. The fact that it’s a terrible form of ID is my point. It being a bad ID doesn’t mean it’s not one.
Edit: I copy/pasted my point about W.Va from one thread to another. Both say, as the law does, that it identifies you. The mail ties the identified person to an address authorized for a license (i.e. an address in the state). It’s authn vs authz.
It’s not do you, it’s can you.
There are plenty of places where just a drivers license isn’t acceptable (getting a passport for instance) and requires you to play the stupid 1/2 from category A/B game.
I agree that bringing up voting is a red herring, that’s a state thing and the several states should solve that for themselves. The US federal government needs a unified ID system which was designed as a robust, centralized ID system that can then be mandated for federal agencies to use.