> If someone is in the US, I want them to have effective tools to defend life.
Historically, representative government has been one of the most effective tools to defend life in the US.
> If they are not eligible to vote
ID checks do not verify eligibility at the time of voting. I can show up with a perfectly valid driver's license and be ineligible to vote for any number of reasons (I am a convicted felon, I am not eligible to vote in this county because I moved and my new license is still being processed, I renounced my citizenship this morning, etc.)
Going the other way -- a person who becomes eligible to vote just in time to cast a legitimate ballot may have trouble producing a valid picture ID confirming this status in time for the election.
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to enforce this at the schema level of the vote database?
Building 50 (different, incompatible) state-level infrastructures to fairly distribute IDs according to principles like those above seems like the one of the harder of all possible ways to accomplish this goal.
Electronic voting is a awful idea, and will never make voting more reliable or more verifiable. But that's a side issue to this discussion about ID.
You could not enforce anything at a schema level without having a way to authenticate who is who, which is accomplished by a human verifying their IDentity.
We already have a 50-state ID system, and it works well. Anyone can get a ID. Centralizing it would make it less reliable because it's easier to attack one system than 50.
> You could not enforce anything at a schema level without having a way to authenticate who is who
You could enforce precisely the goal of only one vote per registered voter.
> We already have a 50-state ID system
That's the point -- we don't, and we don't use what we have very well. The closest thing we have to universal ID cards is the Social Security card, and advocates of voter ID don't want to use it. (In fact, no combination of the source documents used to prove identity for official US business are valid for voting in many states.)
But we definitely do not have a 100% free 50-state ID system that makes it anywhere near as easy to get an ID as is the case for e.g. a Social Security card or passport.
And that's basically the entire sticking point: is it okay for it to be easy for 80% of the populace? 90%? Or does it need to be 100%?
Historically, representative government has been one of the most effective tools to defend life in the US.
> If they are not eligible to vote
ID checks do not verify eligibility at the time of voting. I can show up with a perfectly valid driver's license and be ineligible to vote for any number of reasons (I am a convicted felon, I am not eligible to vote in this county because I moved and my new license is still being processed, I renounced my citizenship this morning, etc.)
Going the other way -- a person who becomes eligible to vote just in time to cast a legitimate ballot may have trouble producing a valid picture ID confirming this status in time for the election.