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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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unable to issue all of its citizens with photo IDs.

Honestly, the IDs themselves are probably the easy part. With birthright citizenship, it's not like we have a conclusive list of citizens even scattered around the country in fragments. It's plausible someone was a home-birth that was never registered with the government, or a child of citizens born out of the country and never registered. And we don't have unique identifiers for our citizens: The SSN is the closest (and terrible for a variety of reasons), but there are people who, for religious reasons the government respects, opt out of having an identifier assigned to them (separate from opting out of Social Security itself for religious reasons, like the Amish).

The way it works in Slovakia is that government knows your place of birth and that is where you are "automatically" assigned as a registered voter as soon as you turn 18. If you move your place of residence elsewhere, then it is on you to approach the government to get your residency papers in order so that you can be automatically reassigned for voting in this new place. If you know you are temporarily out of your city for voting, you can ask for special voter ID that enables you to be manually added to voting list elsewhere, you cannot just pop up in some random place, show your ID and vote. And despite all this, our most important elections have about the same turnout (68% in 2023 parliamentary elections) than let's say 66% for 2020 US presidential elections.

I guess this could be the same in USA. I suppose that if you get into the country legally, you get some kind of residency permit with some home address. In Slovakia, even homeless people have their residency officially marked just as the city/town where they live - there is a "default" government address, which also determines where they can go to vote.

The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address. I guess it's on my driver's license and that's supposed to be updated when I move, but those aren't required, and that's done at the state level. And some people have multiple residences, so you can't cue it on move-in dates.

It's interesting to talk with people from other countries about this, because the US doesn't track its residents anywhere near as closely as other countries I've been to. A hotel in Europe will consistently ask for my passport. In the US, they frequently only ask for a credit card, with maybe an ID only to check that I am the person with the name on the reservation.

The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address.

Neither is it so in Slovakia. You may move about in and out of the country, live decades elsewhere and that is fine. In fact it is a huge issue for major cities, that get portion of income tax of their residents for financing municipal activities. And they get nothing from people living there with official residency in other towns and villages. So they tie stuff like free parking places and other perks to official residency paperwork. But if you dont care, you can skip it.

The point is, that you will be registered voter based on the adress where you live in - for local or national elections. If you cannot be bothered to change the residency, then it is on you.

Birthright citizenship makes it easier, not harder, because birth in the US (which is universally registered, even if the register doesn't suffice to prove identity) is sufficient to prove citizenship.

Verifying citizenship in the UK is a mess because birth in the UK after 1983 doesn't provide British citizenship unless one of your parents was a citizen or permanent resident. If you can trace your ancestry back to 1983 through British citizens born in the UK then you can rely on the chain of birth and marriage certificates, but for a lot of people the documentation they would need to confirm their parents' (or grandparents' - most people being born today have parents born after 1983) immigration status 40 years ago doesn't exist.