Not being required to have an ID card is something we Americans find to be an important freedom. Many (myself included) feel that requiring people to have an ID card is a slippery slope towards requiring people to show that ID card on demand. The idea of an authority figure being able to 'ask for your papers' is a scary one for us.

As the article said, voter fraud is NOT really a problem. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that people illegally voting or voting more than once has happened enough to ever change an election. We want to make it as easy to vote as possible to encourage everyone to vote.

I think it's important to regularly point these issues out, because even though many of "us" intellectually know about them, it's still hard to emotionally grasp for "us", how ID cards could be a slippery slope, why freedom of speech should trump everything else, no matter what, or why home schooling should be allowed at all.

Cultures differ wildly, and it's hard to really accept that the other guy might have a valid point of view.

I consider the claims of fraud on George W. Bush's elections made by Michael Moore to be pretty sufficient...

IIRC his claims were not about individuals committing voter fraud, but fraud in the procedure of processing the votes. Which voter ID laws do nothing to help with.

An electricity bill /and/ being registered in your district. It is not like you can take an electricity bill to any poll location and vote.

20 Euros might not seem like much but if you are making minimum wage it can be significant. And what if you lose your ID? Or you don't have access to the documentation to get an ID right away? Or you are a college student and your residence is with your parents?

The fact is that voter fraud is not a big problem. Disenfranchising voters, however, is a problem. There are even 2000 page tomes on exactly how to go about it.

That's what makes /me/ sick.

"It is not like you can take an electricity bill to any poll location and vote."

It's exactly like that in 8 states + DC ( Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Washington DC.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_voter_registration

Well, just spot checking Wisconsin (because that is the first state to come up when I googled 'election day voter registration' requires a valid driver's license for same day registration.

So, no, not exactly like that.

You need those 20€ only every four to eight years IIRC, and as said you can always apply for assistance if you're earning minimum wage.

Some people are a little squeamish about Germany's mandatory ID cards. I don't blame them really, I think we could all do with a better way of preventing electoral fraud without requiring people to hold state-issued IDs.

Well plenty of people in the USA and the UK have serious issues with mandatory ID cards.

And given Germanys recent past you should be the last Country in Europe to be happy about ID Cards.

I'd argue Germany is ahead democracy-wise than even our most progressive US states.

I'm both a German and US citizen, have lived back and forth between the two countries my entire life, and vote in both countries. Germany is definitely far ahead in the mechanics of democracy: ballot design, voter education, voter id, single set of coherent rules across the nation, etc. That's the benefit of having a great reset of the country a mere 70 years ago (or 23 years ago, depending on where in Germany).

Yes. You have to register at the Police station when you move and hospitals have to report if patients are illegal aliens. Very advanced.

You usually register at the town's "citizen's office", where you can also pay for your garbage disposal, get parking passes, apply for your driver's license, have the lost+found, and so on.

Registering at the police station is something from the sixties or seventies, I think. "Police" back then had a lot more duties that are now located in other administrative offices.

But "police" is a complicated term in Germany, anyway. Legally it's not just "the guys who chase criminals".

Elsewhere it's even stranger: To me "Polizei" sounds like a friendly civilian force for order, while "Miliz" sounds paramilitary and dangerous. To Russians it seems to be different.

In Croatia (I'm a multi-national) registrations actually do happen at the police office in small-ish towns. It's a culture thing, I believe...

I don't know if it differs from state to state or even possibly county to county, but I got my first ID (in Florida), recently and it was 36 dollars and some change, so not to far off

IIRC, most states that have instituted voter id laws have made the cost of an ID free. Also, expired drivers licenses work as identification (for the elderly who have ceased driving).

Even if an ID is free, the documentation required to obtain one may not be free (like a registered birth certificate, for example).

Expired licenses do not work as ID under Texas' new ID law. There was a particularly egregious example of this earlier this year: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2013/11/03/former-u-s-house-speaker-...

I was given a national ID card, it's call a social security card. That is my unique identifying number as an American.

It's not particularly useful as an ID without an expiration, photo, etc. and you're supposed to keep it somewhere safe, not with you.

SSN weren't designed as unique identifying numbers - in fact, until 1972 the cards explicitly said it should not be used as such. It is also way too short to be unique ID within imaginable timeframe. The fact that it is used as such is because americans have no choice - no other common ID to use. Some use name + birthdate instead, but that's even worse.

Add another few digits and we're good, kinda like ipv6.

SSNs are not mandatory.