I always get a kick out of how the same people asking why the US can’t do things every other country does, like single payer healthcare or the metric system will have no end of excuses why the US can’t do that other thing ~every other country does: national ID cards that are used for, among other things, verifying one’s identity when voting.
You might want to see what people are actually saying. The problem with ID checks is that there are barriers to entry which are conspicuously not evenly distributed. If you live in a big city, sure, it's easy but there are a lot of people around the country who have real challenges getting to the closest DMV (which can be hours away after closures and poorly connected to transit), coming up with the various paperwork establishing their identity (e.g. think about a newly-widowed 80 year old whose husband's name was on the mortgage, all of the bills, etc.), and non-trivial amounts of money.
I really wish that someone would seriously propose a voting reform act which would basically be the national equivalent of “motor voter registration” except for anyone, at no cost, and either with widespread offices or free transportation (to cover the poor, old, blind, etc.). Get rid of every possible excuse for not having ID and then we can clean up so many screwy processes which rely on a patchwork of paperwork to handle different situations, no two agencies with identical requirements.
> If you live in a big city, sure, it's easy but there are a lot of people around the country who have real challenges getting to the closest DMV (which can be hours away after closures and poorly connected to transit)
That’s fairly deep in “the administration doesn’t want to.” territory. Granted, Germany isn’t as sparsely populated as the US in some regions, but for example we have pop-up admin posts. Effectively a bus that comes visit every few weeks, clerks pop up an admin office where you can do all the tasks, including getting an ID card. That’s not unfeasible, even in comparatively sparsely populated regions.
> That’s fairly deep in “the administration doesn’t want to.” territory
No, it's describing real things which have happened in the U.S. — for example, in 2015 the state of Alabama closed a number of DMV offices in predominantly black counties. They reversed that in 2017 after outcry and some investigations, but it's not like that's a one-time concern which will never go away. Here's a story from last year with similar concerns (note that this doesn't need to be intended maliciously to have an uneven impact):
That's why I'd like to avoid the issue entirely by having strong legal protections and guaranteed funding. The kind of pop-up you mentioned would be a great solution in rural cases, as would other possibilities like some kind of shared infrastructure with the post office or other government agencies where you could have a trusted third-party take an official picture and seal all of the provided material, etc. The idea would be to pair a voter ID requirement with a guarantee that ID would be free and easily available to categorically remove this class of concern.
I think you’re misreading my post. I’m not saying that this isn’t happening, often with nefarious reasons. I’m saying that this is a man made decision and it can be changed by another man made decision. It’s not a natural law, but people often treat it as auch.
A national ID could be issued not through the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) or other similar bureaucracies in whichever state you live in, but through the Post office. Every citizen has access to a nearby Post Office, and many times more frequently than a DMV.
