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"Where I vote in San Francisco, no ID was required. I was shocked, but they just asked for my address. You can register by filling out a form and they mail you a postcard. You sign the postcard and return it via the mail. All I needed was an address."

http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-v...

This is no different than postal balloting, which only requires a signature. (Do you also oppose postal balloting? I only ask because every time I've attended an election certification board meeting, there's dozens of irregularities with postal ballots. Which doesn't get any attention.)

You may not consider this sufficient. But myself and many others do. Because the rate of voter fraud is infinitesimal and the legacy of disenfranchisement is huge. As an engineer, you cannot consider the costs & benefits, or the risks & rewards, separately.

All those other nations provide a free national ID. Do you support that in the USA? I do.

Further, in the United States, voters must be registered to vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_registration_in_the_Unit...

So maybe the semantics are throwing you off. The voter has already been identified. On election day, their identity is being confirmed.

"Another problem is standardization. We need standardized elections, with standardized vote counting equipment, processes, registration requirements, etc."

Agreed.

"The U.S. is just a huge backwater in this area -- no real chain of custody, no standardization, and no IDs."

And now you've lost me.

>This is no different than postal balloting, which only requires a signature

In principle I don't oppose postal balloting. As implemented, I don't support it, as I think it's not a secure voting system. It would be possible to make it into a secure protocol, though. I am a bit worried about it, frankly.

> All those other nations provide a free national ID. Do you support that in the USA?

Yes, of course. It's crazy we didn't have this 50 years ago.

> And now you've lost me.

We don't have a national id system, or a national voter registry. We don't use a national e-verify system for employment. We don't have national standards for elections. We don't have national standards for voter registration. In one place, there is same day registration, in another you need 60 days. One place uses paper ballots, another doesn't. The system is run by county clerks in backwater places rather than experts at the national level. We are piggy backing social security numbers as a form of authentication, when they are really identifiers and not secrets.

These were all standardized systems adopted in Europe a long time ago. We are completely disorganized in the most important things that are necessary to support the functioning of our democracy. We're even backwards when it comes to simple things like chip and pin.

FWIW, I oppose postal balloting, except where it improves enfranchisement (eg on demand for disabled, military, overseas). It has all the pitfalls of electronic voting and adds a few new ones. It lowers turnout. [1] It leads to ballot chasing, driving up the costs of campaigns, and alienating voters.

The Oregonians get fluffed up in defense. But everyone thinks their baby is beautiful.

[1] Mail ballots in Washington State now have prepaid postage, which appears to have boosted turnout 3%, restoring turnout to the pre-all mail voting levels. We'll see if that holds.

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We have national standards. Enforcement is spotty. It sounds like what you want is national administration. At one time, most of us election integrity activists would have probably agreed with you, before the Voting Rights Act was gutted. If our elections could somehow be administered in a non-partisan way... But I just don't see it on the horizon.

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Chain of custody for paper ballots and gear is the norm. But the best laws, regs, rules mean nothing without civic participation. Administrating and observing elections is a mountain of work. We just don't have enough people stepping up. And election administration nationwide is chronically, notoriously underfunded.

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Despite the opposition to Real ID, we do have national identifiers. The NSA, Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint, Google, Facebook, others have uniquely identified everyone living and dead, tracked in near real-time. But the US Federal government refuses to leverage, license, nationalize these demographic databases for anything other than terrorist watch lists.

Why?

For one, it'd completely moot the current debates around the census, voter registration databases, immigration, Social Security, etc.

You can't manage what you don't measure. And there are powerful interests who thwart all efforts to measure.

Well, I am a supporter of Federalism, but I think national level concerns do need to be managed at the national level. To me, basic identification of citizens and holding elections is a national concern.

By the way, I understand the fear that many on the left have for ID cards. I think it's out of date and overblown, but I get it. However, having elections be managed locally does far more to disenfranchise people. Imagine how much more enfranchised people would be with natiowide short term registration (same day if possible, otherwise say 24-48 hours notice), nationwide free ID, and the same standards for availability and access to poll booths. No more shuttering polls in minority areas, no more unwieldy registration requirements. It seems to me that such an overall package of election reforms should appeal to everyone concerned with the poor voting, and they should be able to concede the ID card issue. It's just a strange thing to fixate on, when the real obstacles to voting are not the ID, and when almost everyone else is able to handle having IDs just fine, and in fact IDs are required for the most trivial things nowadays.

I do think, there are privacy and civil liberty issues that need to be addressed, but as you point out, this stuff is happening now anyway, and I'd be much more comfortable with a standardized national ID and registration system that was democratically controlled than by what is happening now and the resulting chaos of our elections. I am not going to even bring up Florida and the hanging chad debacle.

Voter ID requirements have been proven to disenfranchise poor and ethnic voters time and time again.

https://www.wired.com/story/voter-id-law-algorithm/

Other countries may have different outcomes. But in the US, this isn't up for debate. Factually, and unarguably, the result of requiring voter ID in the US is disenfranchisment.

They have not been "proven" to do that, and it's certainly up for debate. The very article you cite -- which is very far from a theorem or proof of anything at all -- points out that a very small percent of the population is without ID.

The U.S. is not special, and frankly your claim that this is not up for debate is indicative of a type of intransigence and refusal to both face facts and learn from the success of other nations in this area. So participate in the debate or it will go on without you.

Voter Id are laws are coming, and the debate is just getting louder -- it's time the U.S. joins the modern world and reforms the entire system from top to bottom, and including IDs is a basic building block of building a rational voting system that is based on standardization and chain of custody principles, starting with proof that the person who is voting has a right to do so.

Do any of these other countries have the local / state / federal government separation nightmare of the United States, or do they have the same voting standard applied unilaterally for all citizens regardless of location? If not, then they aren't apples to apples comparisons. The American system is 50 different legal bodies, which means 50 governors, 50 senates, N local governments, all doing their best to muck up the system to bend to their own political goals. It's designed to be complicated, which means there can't be an easy answer without re-wiring the entire system.

Many of these countries have a federal system -- the U.S. is not unique in this regard. In fact, switzerland makes our Federalism pale in comparison. Germany is more federalist. The U.S. is not unique in any way in having a federalist system.

Seriously, I need to keep saying this, but the U.S. is not special. We have no special insight about running elections that allows us to do it better than others. We do not have a monopoly on poor people. We don't have better healthcare, we don't have better police, we don't have better schools, or courts, we don't have better civic institutions more generally, and we certainly don't have better voting standards.

We should learn from the rest of the world and adopt best standards that work well across the OECD. Almost everyone in the OECD requires an ID to vote, and they have a better system, on average. We need to drop this irrational (and frankly, racist) notion that our citizens are unable to obtain IDs because they are too poor or dumb or too disorganized to get them.

I'm not sure you understood my point. I am actually in agreement with you that we should be looking to the rest of the world for a voting model that works, because I feel that ours is a failure. I am not advocating against voter-id laws in fact, I am quite for them, but I recognize that these laws in the United States are frequently designed as weapons to be used against members of other parties.

My point is that the rest of the world has exactly 1 legislative body governing elections. America has 51 (perhaps more, I'm not sure to which level of influence local governments can influence electoral processes, but they can certainly influence zoning of polling booths. American resistance to a federal identification card is quite unique, and silly.

I'm sorry. You are that standardization is a problem. You can have different political organizations oversee the voting process. I'm not saying do away with states. Yet you can have a standardized system.

If we built an interstate highway system and have standardization in rail and roads, we can do this for elections as well.

> My point is that the rest of the world has exactly 1 legislative body governing elections.

How do you come to that (wrong) conclusion, especially after the parent comment spelled out for you that other countries have similar federal systems?

"We need to drop this irrational (and frankly, racist) notion that our citizens are unable to obtain IDs because they are too poor or dumb or too disorganized to get them."

Here's a nice writeup about Spread The Vote, one of many orgs helping people get their voter IDs.

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-ge...

FWIW, the misc election administrators have been nudging things closer together. One of the benefits of HAVA. In my experience, the EAC has been reality-based.