[pmyteh]

Politically you may be right. As a piece of policy, it's a solution in search of a problem. Even in places like the UK (which have ID-free voting) personation is essentially a non-problem. Literally a handful of votes a year. If you want to try to influence election results you don't do it at retail, with a high chance of getting caught and low returns, you do something systematic: the present government's drive to redraw boundaries and discourage the 'wrong kind' of voters, perhaps, which will end up being legal but which is deeply scummy, or the kind of skulduggery seen in Erlam v Rahman[0].

Given that any kind of ID requirement is likely to reduce the number of votes (some proportion will lose or forget their ID even if you literally issue IDs to every single eligible person) the ultimate question is this: how many valid votes are you prepared to lose in order to prevent each invalid one?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlam_v_Rahman

[tablespoon]

> Politically you may be right. As a piece of policy, it's a solution in search of a problem.

Voter ID, yeah; but lack of ID, no. My understanding is not having photo ID causes people way more problems than just difficulty voting. If you can solve a real issue through a non-issue, why not?

> Even in places like the UK (which have ID-free voting) personation is essentially a non-problem. Literally a handful of votes a year

That's not the whole problem, though. The other issue is perceptions. If people are no longer trusting and they perceive impersonation as an issue, all the assertions that impersonation isn't a problem aren't going to do any good to rebuild trust.

[pmyteh]

I can't speak for the US. In Britain you don't really need photo id for much. A driving licence, if you drive (plenty don't), a passport if you want to go abroad, or something if you're young (or look young) and want to drink alcohol. I don't think I need mine more than once a year or so. So there's no particular problem being solved there, either.

Now, there was a big drive to set up a compulsory photo ID here under the Blair government. The purpose was really to generate a single central government identity database rather than to help those without ID to lead easier lives, though. It sank years of political debate and a stack of money and was eventually cancelled after public protest. I don't think anyone's going to try again.

I do understand the importance of perception. But when the reality is that personation is essentially a non-problem and one political party is pushing a narrative that it is in order to change the rules to their electoral advantage, I'm not convinced that the best democratic solution is to let them do it. It's interesting that over here there has never been widespread public (as opposed to confected elite) concern about personation, but we did have some public discomfort (with somewhat more foundation) about extensions to postal voting in the 00s. That wasn't really treated as a partisan issue and some of the potential issues were dealt with with follow-up legislation.

[tablespoon]

> I can't speak for the US. In Britain you don't really need photo id for much. A driving licence, if you drive (plenty don't), a passport if you want to go abroad, or something if you're young (or look young) and want to drink alcohol. I don't think I need mine more than once a year or so.

That's true in the US too. You don't need it so much day to day, but it's required for many important processes [1] so it's a big handicap to not have one.

[1] e.g. opening a bank account (https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/how-to-open-a-ban...), traveling on an airplane, and I think you also need one to get a job on the up-and-up (because of required work authorization checks).

[ghaff]

>I can't speak for the US. In Britain you don't really need photo id for much.

One of the reasons the "Getting a photo ID is too hard" argument falls a bit flat in the US is that, at least for anyone participating normally in society, doing a lot of fairly routine things without a government-issued ID gets intensely inconvenient in a big hurry--even if you don't drive.

Most forms of travel including hotels though that may vary by locale. Picking up an order at a store or similar circumstances when a business wants to verify your identity. Opening a banking account. Certainly many of them are things that you can avoid and they're probably less of an issue if you're in a demographic that is less likely to have an ID. But, yes, in the US lots of people have to show ID on a fairly regular basis.