Sorry, it's embarrassingly my bad. I meant physical mail/postal mail/snail mail.
> The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself
I would argue against this. The EU is a continental union[1] and not the same as the US [2]. All european countries are fully soverign states (unlike US states) and most of them are unitary. A few of the EU/European states are federal states/governments, like the US. So I think it'd be more correct to compare the US with Germany, Switzerland or Spain. EU would be something more similar to African Union. And there's also an upcoming EU-ID project [3].
About the US "E-government" (and I'm don't even compare it to systems like Estonia's, but) the problems you described sounds like bad system design and lack of identification.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_union [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation#Contemporary [3]: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Furthermore, EU member states are, in terms of population, much closer to individual US states in size than any of them are to the US as a whole. My state has three times the population of Switzerland.
I don’t know what a “physical email” is. I occasionally receive bills in the postal mail (mixed in with all the spam our postal service likes to deliver every day as some sort of sick and twisted jobs program) but they usually have a QR code I can scan to pay them online.
Social security numbers are de facto national identification numbers. The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself. But you can use a passport or even get a passport card instead if you really want to.
“E-government” is a broad subject. In some use cases (internet voting) I don’t trust it one bit. In other use cases (filing and paying taxes or instant background checks), we have it covered. And in yet other use cases (buying health insurance), it was actually easier to do online before the government took it over, at least in my experience. My previous state set up an online system to file for unemployment during COVID but then lost millions of taxpayer dollars to overseas scammers who would steal the identities of residents at random and file for unemployment in their names; a better system probably could have been implemented if it wasn’t done at the last minute and with zero verification.