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I. My understanding is that would not be a workaround, and the legal system isn't really set up to answer questions in advance like that, even if it would be helpful.
II. Honestly we're partly there. REAL ID requirements for drivers licenses at least in theory required proof of legal status, and is mostly implemented across the country as of next year, though still with some mixed enforcement in some states. I don't have enough specific knowledge to make a claim about the exact effectiveness. It's a good building block, but not totally there. About 85-90ish percent of legal US adults have a driver's license, so if that is used as a starting point it could be pretty effective.
However, if you're building a system from scratch, it suddenly becomes very difficult. We've relied on Social Security numbers as de-facto identifiers even though they never were intended to be for too long, and there's a lot of people who aren't very careful with their documents. The bureaucracy is also very, very bad at handling some of the current difficult cases, in many areas getting snarled up for years.
Remember that to survive a legal challenge, the success rate of the system has to be very, very high. So it's not totally clear to me that the first approach of simply building off of driver's licenses would be sufficient to avoid legal issues. After all, "the government was annoying" is often more than sufficient for a judge to rule in favor of a plaintiff who wants to vote, as a rough oversimplified principle.
You also have to consider things beyond voter ID. A national ID card might easily suffer from mission creep and be used for more things. That's bad from a strictly voter ID perspective, because for example the more incentive to have one if you don't deserve one, the more fraud happens. If it's simply a voter ID and nothing else, history suggests fraud wouldn't be too high. Example: an illegal immigrant might
III. The game changes a bit here. It's my rough understanding, could use more light if someone knows, that while the default goes to the state in actually executing the election, so a state voter ID law would work even for federal elections within the state (when combined as they always are), if there exists federal legislation the interferes, the federal regulation usually takes precedence -- but only for certain relevant cases. I'm not certain if there are currently federal laws that would actually prevent a wide scale voter ID drive from a state. The interaction is complicated.
Either way, we reach a conclusion: a fight to implement voter ID is a 5-10 year process no matter how well you implement it. You have to consider that as a given no matter which route you go. On a specific state level you might be able to pull it off closer to 5.
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