[runako]

> 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.

[jakeogh]

We agree, identity is a basic requirement to see if someones vote should count, and to insure it's only counted once.

[runako]

> to insure it's only counted once

This is a really important goal.

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.

[jakeogh]

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.

[runako]

> 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%?

[jakeogh]

"You could enforce precisely the goal of only one vote per registered voter."

Without ID? How?

What state makes it difficult to get an ID?

[runako]

>>"You could enforce precisely the goal of only one vote per registered voter."

> Without ID? How?

At the schema level, by only allowing one vote per voter ID. In theory, that voter could have been impersonated, but that's a different problem than ensuring only one vote per registered voter. Perhaps, like in most things, we could have a procedure for handling conflicts when a voter determined her voter number had been used twice during an election, instead of clumsily pushing a pre-resolution onto every potential voter.

(The legal cases seem to turn on the fact that the pro-ID folks haven't been able to show any substantial evidence that voter impersonation happens at any scale where it warrants a legislative response. So preventing dupes should be sufficient.)

> What state makes it difficult to get an ID?

I don't know about all of them, but when I have lived in (GA, MA, TX, NY) you had to physically present yourself during business hours for an unspecified and unpredictable amount of time to get the type of ID that satisfies a voter ID law.

As a relatively well-off, generally healthy person who tends to live in the parts of states where they put these offices, the burden on me usually boils down to losing a few hundred/thousand dollars of my time going to an office during business (work) hours to "prove" I'm me.

None of this would be easy if I were less healthy. Or didn't have a car. Or control of my schedule. Or lived in a rural area. Or absolutely needed the money I would earn during the part of the work day when the offices are open. Or could only afford to lose the earnings from making one trip to the office, but it was too full that day so I couldn't make a second. Or a combination of these. Basically: this is our government, why is it trying to tell us when we can and can't get a say?

Designing a system so that it works for people like me doesn't mean it works.