Sorry, it's embarrassingly my bad. I meant physical mail/postal mail/snail mail.
> The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself
I would argue against this. The EU is a continental union[1] and not the same as the US [2]. All european countries are fully soverign states (unlike US states) and most of them are unitary. A few of the EU/European states are federal states/governments, like the US. So I think it'd be more correct to compare the US with Germany, Switzerland or Spain. EU would be something more similar to African Union. And there's also an upcoming EU-ID project [3].
About the US "E-government" (and I'm don't even compare it to systems like Estonia's, but) the problems you described sounds like bad system design and lack of identification.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_union [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation#Contemporary [3]: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...