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How hard can it be to make a federal citizen ID mandatory?
Let's suppose the GOP controls both houses and the presidency. What are the biggest hurdles that prevent them from ensuring that voting in the 2028 election requires a government-issued ID?
I. Is there a constitutional ban on mandatory federal ID? It's a sincere question. I've heard something that went, "well, if an ID costs money and you have to present this ID to vote then technically it's a poll tax and thus violates the 24th amendment", but is it possible to get SCOTUS to definitively answer this question before someone challenges this requirement? For example, if not having an ID was made a felony, would this solve the issue, since felons can't vote?
II. How hard can it be to issue an ID card to every American citizen? I'd wager the vast majority of Americans have enough documents to prove their citizenship, but what about the rest? Something British can work for the bulk of the rest: if they can get two people of good standing (public officials or licensed professionals) to sign their picture, confirming that they know this person and know they are a citizen and why, this should be enough to issue them an ID. If anyone commits fraud, they lose their license or whatever let them be a public official forever, and everyone they vouched for has to find a new signatory. What kind of undocumented citizens will not be able to find two people to confirm their citizenship?
III. How hard can it be to make voter ID mandatory in every state? If I understand correctly, even federal elections are a state matter in the US. How can the federal government make California require the new ID?
The constitution vests the power of determining electors in the legislatures of each state, Congress can't touch it. For example, California prohibits the checking of IDs in their elections (for all obvious reasons) despite it being entirely constitutional for the California Legislature to redefine their method of electoral college voter assignment as a popular vote open to all persons residing or even just currently in the state.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2:
&
What Congress could do, in the imaginary world of unchecked supermajority power and lockstep ideological alignment, is define federal electoral fraud as an act of war, define the perpetrators of federal electoral fraud as unlawful enemy combatants and/or as guilty of treason, and summarily execute them. A nightmare for many reasons and not hyperbole so much as total fantasy driving the point of "Congress can't really do anything." Not anything within the system; declaring the entire government of a state as fraudulent and criminal, sending in the army to arrest them all and run the state via martial law while they get everything sorted out is within their "power," insofar as the sovereign can ultimately do whatever it has the power to do, but that's not the question.
They will probably just tie voter id requirements to all kinds of federal money and force states to implement it that way
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Weirdly that's only for Presidential electors and not for Congress.
Or at least I'm not aware of any analogous caselaw about the manner of congressional elections.
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That's the wrong question in a US context. The constitution grants powers, and all others are reserved to the states or the people. So really you need to ask "is there some constitutional grant of powers which would allow the federal government to mandate ID?".
Right, I always forget it's the other way around in the US.
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I would actually ignore the ID issue. You want fair elections. Just impose requirement on the states about the quality and auditability of the elections. How they achieve it is their own problem.
I mean, I think that would produce partisan politics into it. If I’m in a blue state, I want to detect Red fraud because it reduces my party’s power in the federal government. If I’m in a red state, I want to detect Blue fraud. So you can do that by putting a thumb on the scale based on the kinds of fraud that Reds or Blues are likely to do. Reds might be prone to voter intimidation, so you make very strong rules aimed at preventing that. Blues might stuff ballot boxes or have illegals vote or whatever, so make a rule about that. But you don’t care about your own tribe’s fraud so you either ignore the problem or make it easier.
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Anecdotally, I've been visiting the US for nearly 5 months now and I've been unable to get a state ID (well, driver's permit, I only need to take the picture...) in the 2 states I've been in, waiting in DMVs for literally 10 hours 15 times so far. Appointments in the current place online are 2.5 months out, which is far longer than I'll be here. In a county of a few million, there are 3 DMV offices left. I have a passport but there are extreme barriers in place (...in these Democrat led states.)
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As Rov_Scam mentioned, opposition to federal ID has primarily come from the right in the past (see religious-coded claims that ID cards are the "mark of the beast"), although both sides have expressed privacy concerns about the existence of IDs and/or the corresponding database (after all, that link I just gave was to Huffpost, not exactly known for their right-wing slant).
I have a hard time really caring about the supposed privacy concerns both because the IRS does a perfectly fine job not telling anyone my tax info that shouldn't know it and because my identity isn't private anyway: every registered voter's name/address is public information already. (And, honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of my tax info being secret either.)
There's not even really a need for the physical card. The whole point of a photo ID is to present a photo verifiable by a human along with a counterfeit-proof claim of some information about the person that's a photo of (for voting, the information that matters is name, address, and citizenship status). There's no reason other than the implementation complexity for requiring each person to carry around a plastic card instead of having the verifier look up that information in a database, which could alleviate fears of the cost of replacing an ID card.
That said, there's at least two separate issues that ID is being proposed to solve:
*(Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting. The requirement to be a citizen to vote was added in most states as part of the wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the early 1900s. Before then, a stated intention to settle permanently in the United States was sufficient. Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic.)
Why do you think so?
I agree that having a class of legal residents who can never earn the right to vote would be undemocratic. However, this sounds like an argument for a faster pathway to citizenship, or perhaps some non-citizen permanent resident status that comes with voting rights, if you like.
But why should persons who have not put down roots in the US, or who have not otherwise meaningfully contributed to the fabric of our society in some way*, have a say in the long-term future of our country?
You may object that there are 18-year-old citizens who vote without having permanently settled anywhere. To this I would say, does our 18-year-old citizen voter have a US citizen parent?
If yes, I would say that my ideal model of US citizenship—which, to be sure, differs from the reality—is that in exchange for the aforementioned “contribution to the fabric of our society”, the social contract grants to each citizen and his descendants in perpetuity a presumptive right to a say in our nation’s future, in the absence of a compelling reason to the contrary (such as a felony conviction or naturalization in another polity).
If no, now you understand the case against birthright citizenship.
*Reasonable people can disagree on this matter, but examples of such might be: military service, or running businesses which gainfully employ individuals in economically deprived areas.
Your suggestions don't sound terribly different from how it worked pre-1926. There's wording about people "who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States". I don't have strong feelings about exactly where to draw the line at what counts, but in the current system, the best case requires living in the US for 5+ years and excludes plenty of people who end up living in the US for the rest of the lives. Describing those people as not having put down roots in the United States feels misleading to me.
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Has there been any major legislative push to achieve this in the past four years?
The voting rights push that didn’t get cloture had a provision requiring voter ID. Presumably everyone who matters agrees it’s constitutional, even if only in private.
This thread isn't about voter ID, It's about national citizen ID.
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I can't imagine that this is a serious objection since I expect just about every state offers a no fee ID option for at least some people. But I'd be on board with making IDs free to make this objection go away. States can keep charging for drivers licenses.
It unfortunately is a serious objection, even though it's a terrible one. I've seen it in the wild more than once.
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Traditionally, GOP opposition to mandatory ID has been a bigger hurdle than anything else. I say bigger because there hasn't exactly been a ton of enthusiasm from the left for this idea either, and it's never been a huge issue.
If our experience with Real ID is any indication, pretty hard. The law requiring it was passed in 2005 and was supposed to go into effect in 2008. No states were even compliant until 2012, and the full implementation date — when you'll actually need a Real ID to board a domestic flight — has been pushed back repeatedly, currently scheduled for sometime next year. But even then it won't actually be required until 2027; you'll be informed of the noncompliance but allowed to board anyway. This, of course, assumes that the deadline doesn't get pushed back again, and while I won't speculate on the chances of that, only something like half of the people even have Real ID compliant identification.
To give you a sense of what's involved, I helped a woman do this a couple years ago. She had been married twice, and used the last name of her second husband. So while she had her birth certificate, it didn't show her legal name. I had to go to the marriage license department and pull two marriage licenses, both from the 1980s, and then go to the prothonotary to pull the divorce from the first marriage. This is why I roll my eyes when people like JD Vance talk about going door-to-door looking for people to deport. I'd imagine the number of native-born citizens who can immediately produce proof of citizenship upon request is a lot lower than some seem to think it is. I know where my birth certificate is right now, but a lot of people don't. And I'd imagine that the number of married women who have certified copies of their marriage license with their personal papers is vanishingly small (no, the certificate they give you doesn't count).
I kind of think this is a good reason to centralize all of this stuff -- births, deaths, marriages, divorces, name changes.
When my kids were born, we had to take their county-issued birth certificates and send them into the SSA.
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Multiple agents, Hlynka disciples. Honestly, how many people just have a current non-compliant driver's license that is valid for a few more years, and just don't care to waste a day with the sloths and pay for a new one. It's easy enough to still just travel with the non-compliant DL and deal with the problem later. Hell, maybe they have an alternate form of ID that they could use and figure, "Eh, if we get closer and I need to travel, I'll decide if I'll go get a new DL or just take this other ID instead." If (when) word gets out that the signs are a lie and that they'll just hand you a piece of paper trash that won't make it 100ft past security, those agents can very rationally choose to just wait until their current DL expires.
I viscerally feel that there are real stories of difficulties with paperwork. I've experienced it, myself and with my wife. Still going through some with her. But if apathy is sufficient to prevent change, apathy will successfully prevent change.
Just to give you my own story: I still don't have a Real ID. In PA DLs are good for 4 years. I renewed mine in 2017, but PA wasn't Real ID compliant until 2018. Nonetheless, family members were telling me I sould upgrade anyway because I'd need it to fly come 2020. Now, in addition to the paperwork, a Real ID costs double what a regular DL costs, so there's that. And I don't fly often so using my passport isn't too much of a hassle anyway, since that's always acceptable ID. Then COVID delayed the full implementation, and when my DL came up for renewal in 2021, the DL Centers were closed and they were doing everything by mail (my license still has a 2017 picture which looks nothing like me, for various reasons). I'm sure if I really needed it there would have been some way to get one but it wasn't exactly a pressing concern. Then I lost my wallet this past summer and had to get a new license and my parents told me I should do the Real ID then but I wasn't wasting a Saturday in the summer getting a driver's license and had to go on my lunch break and getting a reprint takes long enough as it is that I wasn't about to overcomplicate things by getting a Real ID at the same time. So maybe when my license expires again next year I'll get one, but I don't really see any compelling reason to.
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This is exactly what I did. The NJ process for getting a Real ID is by all accounts "The Simpsons DMV"-worthy. The Federal process for getting a passport card when renewing your passport is to pay an extra $30. No contest. (You can skip the card and use the passport book, but carrying the book around is much less convenient)
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Just make the ID free!
Lord knows we pay enough in taxes to expect some very basic services to be complimentary.
I agree and would add that the federal government already has lots of experience issuing hspd-12 id cards to their employees and contractors (these include the ability to load certs on them so you could even get nice public key infrastructure), they could just run essentially the same system in parallel
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Felons CAN vote - depending on their state. Different states have different rules.
Even if someone can no longer vote because they became a felon after breaking the law in a state that does not allow felons to vote, they still have the ability to challenge the law - a successful challenge would make them no longer felon, thus meeting redressability and other standing requirements.
It isn't actually that hard to get IDs, and I respect the states that allow things like university IDs to count. The main mechanism is cost - should first time IDs be covered by the government? While not prohibitively expensive, the amount of friction that can be lessened doesn't hurt. Also, DMVs suck.
Asking others to sign your picture leads to perhaps more racism, because people with accents who may very well be citizens will face more battles convincing someone to sign their picture. However, it's not that hard to get an ID. I have trouble believing the vast majority of Americans have never opened a bank account, bought alcohol, bought a cigarette, gotten on an airplane, picked up certain medications, or any of the myriad of things that require an ID. IDs are required in so much of our lives here.
It's unlikely we can have a federal voter ID law unless we tie some form of federal funding to the request (example: raising the legal drinking age by tying road funding to the request). The methods by which states conduct their elections is inherently the province of the states and not the purview of the federal government. It's why each state does things so differently from its neighbors, and why we have wacky things like hanging chads or what not. It's why we included poll taxes as an amendment to the Constitution. It's why certain attempts to standardize voting have failed or have been chipped away at in court.
Citizens with accents usually have their Certificate of Naturalization in a special folder inside their secure drawer. Unless you're talking about AAVE.
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