Voting ID rules isn't just a state thing. On June 17, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that states cannot require proof of citizenship in cases of voter registration for federal elections unless the state receives federal or court approval to do so. That is the feds have said the states can't just solve that for themselves.
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.
Edit: firstly, this is a distraction (i.e. a red herring) from the debate about national IDs. We have a national ID issue which needs to be fixed.
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.
What's the solution, though? I live in California, and my state-issued ID doesn't say anything about my US citizenship. When I registered to vote (online), I had to certify that I was eligible to vote. Yes, the penalties for lying are steep, but if the state can't verify if I'm lying or not, how will I get caught?
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.
Thanks for the reference. Your idea is that maintaining an official national database of people, linked to driver's licenses, would make it harder to commit fraud; is that right?
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.
Nope. As I’ve said other places in this thread we should replace the social security card and number with a modern identity system.
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.
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.