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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

We do need one, yes, but realistically we'd have to delay the requirements for presenting one until something like 99.9% of people could be shown to have been issued one. Otherwise it's not really fair and would be a huge lever for abuse.

This always comes up with identification requirements for voting. It seems superficially reasonable to require them, especially if you are looking at it from abroad, or if you are pretty young. But the fact is that within living memory many American states had local policies of not recording the births of black people, and to this day there are many living black people who can't prove their own citizenship.

Unless and until every one of the fifty US states can demonstrate that they've put an ID card in the hands of virtually everybody, it won't be reasonable to condition things like education, health care, or voting on the possession of one.

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Other countries have national ID's and dont seem to have stumbled on these problems. Nations that had massive changes to territory and population in the few decades have functional national ID's. If nations that didn't exist 30 years ago manage to pull it off then so can the US. There are enough examples now that all major pitfalls should be well understood and their successful mitigations known. Resistance to national ID is just FUD at this point.

This is America. We don't learn from examples abroad. Just look at our transportation and health care systems.

Anyway I'm not saying such a system is impossible. I am saying that you'd have to order it such that the requirement for presenting the national ID was not triggered until universality was achieved. I will add that there are abundant forces in national, state, and local politics who would fight universal national ID systems, which would range from deranged Libertarians to classic racial vote suppressors who support ID requirements but who at the same time fight against actually issuing IDs.

> This is America. We don't learn from examples abroad.

So you're saying we won't therefore we shouldn't try? Somehow the Austrians and Hungarians and various Yugoslav republics and Latvia and Poland and Switzerland and basically every country in eastern and southern europe all can keep track of the people born within their borders even as the borders shifted but the US can't tell a black american? It just sounds like a very very weak argument to me.

I think you're underestimating the intransigence of various American political constituencies. None of those jurisdictions you mentioned would even be the largest American state, much less as large as the whole nation. In America, because of federal powers, states representing a minority of citizens can stop the federal government from doing things that seem easy and reasonable. They can also stop other states from doing those things. So, for example, if California decided to have a universal mandatory identification program, a federal department of justice that had been installed by a minority of voters from other states could sue, in federal court, to stop it. Same goes for, God forbid, address registries, that are common and unremarkable feature of almost every European jurisdiction. We don't have them here, and we will probably never have them, at least not without a revolution or constitutional reform.

If you want to know why Latvia has national ID cards and America doesn't, just imagine if there was a venue where Montenegro could sue Latvia to stop it from having them. That's the American system!

As someone born in yugoslavia, now in slovenia (I haven't moved, the country has), i can say that it's perfectly managable, and I have no idea how americans can't do it.

It’s taken us nearly 20 years to even implement Real ID. I don’t think the US has the institutional knowledge to build a national ID system without a multi-decade effort.

> But the fact is that within living memory many American states had local policies of not recording the births of black people, and to this day there are many living black people who can't prove their own citizenship.

It seems like you havent thought this through well enough. How do the people you metion do other things in life, like get a driver's license, employment, or a bank account?

Besides, if they can't prove their identity today, what would change for them when others get a new id card? Those people wouldn't be impacted.

It seems like it is you who haven't thought it through. There are tens of millions of Americans who are eligible but do not have state drivers licenses. There are tens of millions of Americans with no bank accounts. The underground cash economy is huge.

There's a reason in many farm states no license is required to drive farm vehicles for farm business.

> There are tens of millions of Americans who are eligible but do not have state drivers licenses. There are tens of millions of Americans with no bank accounts. The underground cash economy is huge.

Yes. But, you don't need to repeat yourself in every post. The point I stated, which you glossed over, is that the people who do not have licenses today will not be at a further loss, when others obtain a national identification. How will today's unlicensed people be harmed when a national id is created?

This entire subthread is about how financial aid for education would be less prone to fraud if there were a national ID card system. That's how the people who didn't have one would be harmed: they would be denied educations.

Actually, they wouldn't be harmed, since nothing would change for them. And for everyone else, there would be less chance to engage in fraud.

You still haven't explained what the harm would be. Nobody who can get an education now would suddenly not be able to get one.

Why can't they get one? How can countries like India manage it? How can former yugoslav countries manage, when the borders shifted only recently? ...and USA can't?

You wouldn't have to condition those things on it, but if 90% of people were easy to verify and the other 10% relied on existing systems, it would still be less burdensome overall and also easier to catch fraud.

For the people that can't prove they were born, how does a new ID card make it worse? It seems like it would make it better since the new system wouldn't be tied to birth ancient birth certificates or SS #s

It doesn't make it worse when you just issue IDs, but it would make it worse if you required them before they were virtually universal.

Today the coverage of state IDs is actually very poor. People who hold them believe they are universally held but in truth only 89% of adult Americans possess one. That is not high, it is terrible.

In order to rollout a whole new ID system you'd need so way to validate the identity of the recipient before you gave them a new one. Presumably the easiest way would be just to turn in your old ID card, which many people don't have, per the previous comment.

It's a gradient. People with existing identity docs are frictionless, state IDs, driver's licenses, passports. Heck, ID.me and Stripe Identity can proof these folks remotely. People without those docs still have birth certificates and other legacy identity docs. You use trust anchors and identity to proof them into new identity systems. The latter requires a solid and robust ground game, similar to USPS or the US census, to ensure extremely high rates of coverage to prevent disenfranchisement or a digital divide.

(a component of my work is digital identity/IAM)

So how do you prove your identity now, when you need eg. a drivers licence?

Just wait for full vaccine passport rollout and use that... All the same problems and effects as with mandatory IDs (plus more), but people usually worrying about that don't care. A perfect tool for a policy change.

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