[cryptoz]

You do not need to prove you are a citizen to vote. Voter registration requirements vary state to state. Typically states will request some form of identification, like a social security number, or a birth certificate, or something like that, if you do not have a photo ID, so they can verify who you are and that you did not vote twice. A government issued photo ID, or other proof of citizenship, is not required. That would be unconstitutional.

Edit: California will even allow you to use a utility bill with your name and address as valid ID to vote, for example. No photo ID or citizenship requirement, and no voter fraud happening in California either.

[DanAndersen]

If requiring a government-issued photo ID is, as you claim, unconstitutional, then why is requesting identification of any sort (SSN, birth certificate, utility bill) not also unconstitutional?

>no voter fraud happening in California either

If the current method for identifying people doesn't require a photo ID, by what means are we able to claim that there is no voter fraud in California? How would we know that is the case if legally there is not a mechanism to catch or even detect hypothetical cases of it happening?

[allannienhuis]

> If requiring a government-issued photo ID is, as you claim, unconstitutional, then why is requesting identification of any sort (SSN, birth certificate, utility bill) not also unconstitutional?

because goverment-issued photo ID can be denied or made prohibitively expensive to large numbers of poor people who's interests might not align with the people in power. Other forms of identification are simpler to obtain by the poor.

Most functioning democracies have the means to assess the level of voter fraud without requiring photo IDs. There are a bunch of civil servants who have that exact job; I think the onus should be on people who believe there is systemic voter fraud occurring to provide some evidence before additional restrictions should be put into place.

Also, democracies were also functioning fairly well long before photo IDs were invented.

[DanAndersen]

>Most functioning democracies have the means to assess the level of voter fraud without requiring photo IDs.

I'm seriously asking, how do they determine this to the level of confidence you're asserting?

[allannienhuis]

many places use simple ink-on-finger from fingerprinting the voter. I believe they're more common in less-developed places. Other places simply accept non-photo id. In Canada most people just present their voter card, which is mailed to them - it doesn't have a photo on it. However even without the voter card, other non-photo id options are acceptable.

For those who insist on it, why is photo-id neccessary? Why is the photo-id level of assurance the bar that needs to be crossed? Any system can be cheated, but some are simply good-enough, and they balance the drawbacks of higher-security systems.

I don't have the same kind of lock on my front door as the bank does to their vault. The lock on my front door isn't perfect, but it's good enough for the threats it's likely to face, and avoids the drawbacks that having a bank-vault lock on my front door would.

I'm also genuinely curious why the people who insist on photo-id for voting believe the threat of voter fraud is high or likely enough to warrant that level of assurance compared to a slightly simpler system without the photo. Do you really live in a place where you'd expect enough voter fraud for it to have a material impact on how your democracy functions?

[DrScump]

  so they can verify who you are

How do you "verify" that the person presenting a birth certificate or SSN is the person named on a document?

  no voter fraud happening in California 

As someone who has already experienced somebody voting in my place multiple times, I can assure you that that is hogwash.

[squiggleblaz]

I'm not in America but I've had to vote in many elections. I don't think I ever presented any ID ever, they just took my word that I'm the one who I said I was. (I think there was once a state election when they posted me a token that I was supposed to return to vote.) Yet the elections here are widely regarded as high quality.

But if your goal is to prevent double voting, you would just use the inks they use in some newer democracies. Then you know John MacIlroy only voted once because you can see it on his fingers. This is probably even more reliable because you won't cut off your finger to hide the ink, but anyone can go get a false id. And no-one is disenfranchised because someone stole their wallet last week and they haven't received their replacements yet.