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Notes -
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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