A Systems Design View of Why Voter ID Is Irrelevant

> You need an ID to buy a beer, board a plane, or rent a jet ski. Why not to vote?

Not to detract from TFA author's technical perspective, but buying a beer, boarding a plane, or renting a jet ski are not constitutional rights. Voting is a constitutional right. My stance on voter ID is similar to my stance on online age verification via zero-knowledge proofs: excellent only if the government willingly implements them without shortcuts or loopholes. As I wrote previously about the difficulty of implementing voter ID laws [1]:

> 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.

Just for fun, a very recent "you need ID for X but not for voting?" entry is Olive Garden Never-Ending Pasta Bowl [6].

My citation numbers have a gap because I assimilated the citation numbers from my past comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41351632

[2] https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...

[6] https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/07/22/olive-garden-pasta-id...