The GOP’s sweeping new anti-voting bill cleared the U.S. House Wednesday, setting up a high-stakes battle in the Senate.
The House voted 218-213 to pass the SAVE America Act, which experts have said could disenfranchise millions by requiring voters to show documentary proof of citizenship at registration and to provide photo ID when they cast ballots.
Republicans have argued for voter ID broadly, pointing out that there isn’t much to prevent a noncitizen from casting a ballot in a federal election — besides the fact that it’s a felony, easily caught, and would lead to deportation all for the chance to cast one out of hundreds of thousands of votes.
This is a daylight robbery. Time to respond in kind.
Time for women everywhere to refuse to take their husband’s surname when they get married.
My friend changed her name socially, but not legally about 18 years back purely because she was too lazy to do all the paperwork it took to change your name. Now, her husband says it was one of the smartest choices she could have done and I agree.
Why’s it smart? I think I’m too stupid to understand
When someone (traditionally a woman) changes her name when she gets married she has to change it with everything, including social security, which is a real pain in the ass. It also means that her “real name” is now different to the name on her birth certificate. So if she tries to use her birth certificate as proof of identity and citizenship, like for this other ID bill, it likely would be denied as proof bc the names don’t match. So she would probably have to get a passport if she doesn’t already have one. Except to get her passport she would probably also need to use her birth certificate or a whole bunch of other stuff. Basically, tho bill doesn’t explicitly say “we want to make it harder for women to vote” but it will cause issues for everyone and women will be disproportionally affected bc traditional women take their husband’s last names
Marriage certificates have the wife’s maiden name, and then specify a space for a new surname, just in case someone changes the surname when they get married. I guess the point I am making is that there is a way over the hurdle as long as that info is on your marriage certificate.
For sure, and standard legal name changes give you a certificate of name change, but it’s another thing to pile onto the burden of proof for every step along the way. Shit adds up and becomes cumbersome quick.
I’m guessing birth certificate has maiden name and proves citizenship.
Passport has today’s name and does the same.
The GOP voted to take away the rights from almost every married woman in the country, think about that for a second and you’ll understand why they even made the SAVE act.
They claim it’s about immigrants, but it’s truly about taking away the right to vote from people the GOP doesn’t like. So if you aren’t a rich, white, male, you cannot vote under GOP rule.
The GOP voted to take away the rights from almost every married woman in the country
No, they didn’t. This isn’t going to be enforced in heavily Republican districts where women are loyal conservative voters.
When they need to catch up, or find votes, they will go around removing dem district votes with stuff like this.
I wonder how much of the push behind this is from asshole men worried that their kinder wife is secretly voting against the republicans.
Weren’t conservative white women and “trad wives” blamed wholesale for Trump’s 2024 win?
Shouldn’t this be giving Democrats a collective erection?
They might’ve gotten a lot of shit, but the reality is that women and lower-income people, those who will be most affected by the bill, are a core of the democrat voter base
I think what’s funny is that if they did get that, they’d never win another election again. Literally the only pro-republican voting block is undereducated white men. If you locked out anyone who didn’t have a passport, dems would have a supermajority across the country.
Not really they win white woman in whole swaths of the country too. Just not as high, white men it is really high though like 65 pc or something.
They need to eliminate the filibuster to pass this in the senate. It’s dead on arrival.
How is it that just about every democratic country on the planet requires voter ID but some reason people think US citizens are to stupid to figure it out?
It’s because in the US, magically democratic areas will have extremely high security implemented by elderly republican volunteers and no amount of proof of citizenship will be enough if you don’t look like you will vote the right way
In canada I registered to vote and then showed photo I’d No proof of citizenship at poll
Because US citizens keep demonstrating that’s probably true.
This season of House of Cards is thrilling!
grabs popcorn
oh wait, I’m living inside the tv show… 🫠
Well done american voters! And a special shoutout to all the sitouts who stood idly by and let a fascist child rapist in on their watch.
When the fuck do we just start killing politicians and billionaires? Seriously. Why are we still pretending like laws mean anything in this fucking country?
Dude they won’t even vote, let alone peacefully shut down, let alone take the violent path.
Which isn’t very wise anyway.
Someone has to decorate the white house as a school, it would be shot up in seconds
They most certainly killed a lot of people too. If not directly, then indirectly. Don’t see anything wrong with returning the favor
Imagine if all those school & mass shooters instead chose corrupt politicians and billionaires…
deleted by creator
Luigi showed us the way.
MORE killing is never the answer. Did you know that there were really… effective “instruments” in the old ages?
Are you referring to guillotines and nooses?
deleted by creator
Thumbscrews
deleted by creator
GOP is scared. They know, short of gestapo-like tactics this November, their days are numbered.
Sucks that they’re capable of gestapo type tactics, then.
It’s not what they’re capable of, it’s what they are able to do without repercussions. When there is no penalty people can do very bad things, like in war.
The repercussions will be at worst felt by the grunts on the ground, and those repercussions will be used as an excuse to somehow disregard contentious voting site results…
Married women can’t vote because the names don’t match.
This will skate through the Senate. Elections in the USA won’t mean shit after this.
And wtf can be used as “proof of citizenship”
Ironically, passports which most non-native-born Americans already own and keep updated constantly because they often travel in and out of the country to visit family and attend events.
It’s projected this is going to hurt red states more than blue, since most midwest white-as-fuck Americans who never left their hometown and are scared of the whole world don’t have a shred of identification past their driver’s license.
Meanwhile, most immigrant families I know have their passports and copies of their birth certificates on-hand at all times.
I really don’t think that the majority of them can afford travelling regularly. this will hit many people
Some paper you lost 30 years ago
A “real ID”, a state driver’s licence or identity card which was verified with a birth certificate, passport or citizenship certificate.
ReadID verifies identity, not citizenship
A real ID does not mean US citizen. Non-US citizens can receive a real ID. It just proves you are a lawful resident in the US.
Same for drivers license and ID card.
A birth certificate does no good on it’s own. And verifying a birth certificate is another can of worms. If it can only be the official government issued one? Then you get into the whole birth right citizen thing. You can easily be a US citizen without being born in US.
Passport would be the closest thing to a true “Citizen ID”. US Nationals can receive a US passport without being citizens.
Citizenship certificates would fix the birth certificate problem of US citizens being born outside of the states. However they cost 1k+. Maybe they can make them cheaper or hand them out?
It’s laughable how bad identification is in the US. We still use social security numbers.
I wouldn’t be against Voting IDs if everyone was issued one for free and replacements were easy and inexpensive to obtain.
I have my birth certificate, federal ID, and social security card handy. If that’s not good enough, they can go fuck themselves. How much more proof does one need?
Here we go. This is how they’re going to further oppress the opposition and keep the regime in power. Anything to keep Trump from paying for his crimes.
I’m still wondering if this is going to be another case of themselves shooting themselves in the dick.
Most major urban centers and areas with the most electoral value are populated by metropolitan people and immigrants who already are well-used to carrying their passports and copies of all their validating paperwork. I travel a lot and know a lot of immigrant families, they almost all always carry a passport as primary identification (especially right now) and have photocopies of their paperwork and related documents.
Meanwhile, across most of rural, white hicksville America, people often don’t even have ID because they never left their town, and those who do may have their driver’s license and not much else.
I am really unsure what the administration’s plan is here. I figured they would have rolled out a voter ID law that actually helps them.
The chaos might be enough to sow doubt when the claims of rigging start flowing, as we all know they will… maybe that’s all they really want, and everything else is a bonus.
I fully agree, and you can just look around here for an example of what they intended for this to do, lots of lefties here screaming and crying that we need to do a civil war or some shit, and that the election will be stolen and voting is useless.
(For bonus points, check the account ages on many of these people.)
I just don’t think it’s going to have the impact they think it will, I think there’s going to be a public sentiment steamrolling them. People always vote out the incumbent leadership when they’re struggling and unhappy and I’ve never seen the country less secure and more fed-up with the prices of shit and the distracting culture-war nonsense.
The alternative was a woman! Of color!
/s for the fucking halfwits
To everyone saying people needed to wait until the mid-terms to take action: Fuck You.
We have ZERO leadership to capitalize on momentum by people marching and protesting, this is why BLM and No Kings had the highest turnout of protestors in history but led to NOTHING.
This isn’t a matter of people being complacent, this is people waiting for a “perfect leader” who will never come.
At least the right is so dumb that they will latch onto anyone, warts and all, to be their “daddy will save us” figurehead. It’s utterly broken and deficient on every level, but it becomes actual movement and political capital.
We can’t even get liberals and progressives to agree “if it’s okay to carry the American flag” and that’s why we have lost ALL our ground and why things are going to get worse.
Let me repeat that so you and everyone really get it.
Nobody is coming. It’s going to get worse.
Dude liberals can’t even comprehend that most Christians are on their side.
A long, tireless campaign of turning all of our social discourse and social pressure into online arguments and forum exchanges has made the bulk of America’s literate people tune out of political involvement entirely, how do we think there’s any chance of a “revolution” like so many people are calling for?
The exit polling from 2024 should be making us all CRY.
We can’t get enough people on-board for “general” strikes, we can’t get average people who want the same thing to agree on basic facts about reality like if science is valid and if vaccines work, we can’t get average, literate people to even want to be around other people anymore. Dating and sex have fallen off a cliff, people are more lonely than they’ve ever been, while at the same time clinging to their discord friend groups with snarling defensiveness when you suggest that they need to socialize more. Asociality has become an identity.
We can rebuild a positive movement if we focus on our communities, our neighbors and neighborhoods and our schools and workplaces, we can get people to connect again and start working towards group goals… but it takes a kind of work that most online leftists want NOTHING to do with, which is actual work towards better outcomes that they may not see themselves, because all of this takes a long time and a lot of patience and persistence and being social and understanding emotional intelligence.
That mentality pisses me off. Partially because they’re definitely going to rig them; but more because thousands of people are dying every week. Thousands are being disappeared. How many folks were sent to CECOT? How many people were grabbed off the street? The ICE abductions were the tipping point and tragically we failed. (It didn’t help to have all the libs yelling “DON’T FIGHT BACK!!”)
You’re going to sit back and hold a zen zone through 2 years of holocaust? Really? The entitlement of those folks is insane.
Who do you think is saying that?
I mean, these guys pay good money for propaganda, I’m sure they have people posting shit like that everywhere to ensure people wait
Fuck the propagandists is a valid position to take.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single person saying that. Plenty saying that you should vote when mid-terms roll around, but none saying that you shouldn’t be doing anything before or after.
For example, this post last month: https://lemmy.world/comment/21539323
I sent a new reply to that comment with a link to this article and they still replied “that’s how elections work and you need to wait until November”.
Lund isn’t exactly sane.
Wow. Yeah that person’s a dumbass.
Yep. I’ve been asking for months and months where the protests are, and what about general strikes and so on. All I get is “it takes time to coordinate, just you wait” “it’s starting slow but will get up some steam soon” “wait til the mids” “it’s a big country, it’s very difficult to do anything but we will sort it blah fucking blah!”
It’s all bullshit.A fucking failed reality TV star, convicted criminal, idiotic bankruptcy champion, confirmed rapist and deffo child rapist took over the whole of the uNazied States of america in less than a year and 99% of their population did fuck all about it. Fuck and all.
After decades of them watching action movies whilst stroking their guns and threatening to shoot anyone who encroached their freedoms…yet a fucking orange geriatric paedo went full dictator on them without as much as a whimper. Pathetic.
I’ve been asking for months and months where the protests are
Both the middle school and the high school in my tiny rural town did a walkout today. There’s a protest every day outside the local ICE facility. There have been soft strikes as grassroots support networks form.
If you think nothing is happening, it’s because you’re not doing anything. Get involved.
and what about general strikes and so on.
A general strike is desperately needed, but it genuinely isn’t as easy as just calling for one and hoping everyone jumps onboard. Unions need to coordinate together to organize a proper one that won’t fizzle out, which I will admit has been an agonizingly slow process, but it does appear to be happening.
The best thing we can do in the meantime is to unionize our workplaces if it isn’t already, help a friend unionize theirs, speak up at union meetings about the importance of preparing and organizing a general strike (set up strike funds, contact other unions and mutual aid orgs to plan a date and resources, etc), and joining a local mutual aid group that will help us weather the strike.
I’ve been spreading this guide showing how to prepare for resistance as far and wide as I can. If you’d like to chip in and spread that as well, you have my full permission to copy and paste it wherever you think it’d get the most eyeballs (that goes for anyone else reading this too, your help would be much appreciated. Just try to make sure you post it where it won’t be totally off topic and unwelcome).
You can access the markdown version of that guide by clicking the little page icon with the folded edge beneath it (on lemmy through the browser), so you don’t have to manually copy the links or the formatting.
Kinda hilarious that you critique others for not organizing while you yourself also are not organizing.
Your criticism is you asked if there were protests, nobody organized them, and now you complain no one has organized one.
You can organize too you know.
If you are saying this as someone outside the country that’s a bit different. Obviously if you are not there you are not responsible to organize.
Anyway there are protests that have been happening, look at minneapolis. There have been quite a few protests, they need to go further, but they have been growing and increasing in frequency for a while now
There have been protests all over the country. We are almost at the point of civil war if this ICE sh continues. I have been protesting
Why would I travel to the uNazied States of america?
Oh lordy, no. Maybe about 3 decades ago I would have liked to visit, but now I want just one thing from there.
Just one…I’m not interested in your food, or entertainment, like I used to be.
I’m not interested in your products and services etc etc etc.
All I want from you guys is to make the orange child rapist suffer consequences for his MANY MAAAANYYY crimes.That’s all.
The crimes were blatant and are easy convictions, all you guys need to do is put down your mega gulps, struggle up from your armchairs, and PUT SOME EFFORT IN !Pretty much every other country that’s been affected by the tRUMP-Epstein files are doing investigations in to it. Princes are losing their titles and big mansions. People are resigning from their jobs etc in shame because of the furore caused by it all…
Yet in america, nothing is happening to those who committed the crimes. Fucking nothing. The fat cunt keeps on doing evil shit and hardly anyone is interested over there.
Whatever you guys are doing to get rid of that scum then DO MORE!!Please re-read this from my comment
If you are saying this as someone outside the country that’s a bit different. Obviously if you are not there you are not responsible to organize.
I don’t expect you to come here and fix things if you aren’t from here. Your rant was unnecessary.
People are doing something and efforts have been increasing through out this term. Unfortunately Republicans control all branches of government and are morally bankrupt ghouls that will never go after their own. Mid-terms elections give a good chance to change that, if they happen. If they don’t happen I expected things to kick off, because then all hope of a peaceful resolution will be gone.
But I’m not going to let you ignore the efforts that already exist either. People are protesting, more and more each week. People were out protesting at -12C. They are plenty determined. I’m not going to criticize them for not forfeiting their lives to start and armed rebellion. The people are mobilizing, our elected officials refuse to listen. Things will continue to grow as they have been, sorry this isn’t enough for you.
You know what, FUCK…you are correct. I am ranting.
And I apologise.I just can’t understand how it got so bad, so quickly. Relatively speaking. Yeah, it was bad during that idiot Bush but then some sense prevailed with Obama and then it seems like mass stupidity took over. Then biden came along and I hoped common sense would rear its head.
And it did, but only slightly. But then he took his time with the prosecutions. Then the fat paedo started farting his mouth off about the presidency again and I though “there’s no way they could be that stupid again”. Yet here we are.And I’m getting angry about it again.
The thing is Dolly Parton herself could knock at my door and say she tried to stop it and I’d reply “you should’ve tried harder”. And I love Dolly. I think she’s an angel.Again, I apologise for the ranting. My point remains the same, however I deffo should’ve tried to get it across better.
I just can’t understand how it got so bad, so quickly. Relatively speaking.
It’s not too different from other fascist takeovers. Hitler and Mussolini went from being jokes to seizing dictatorial control in a relatively short time. Their rise was spurred by the failures of liberal style governments to adequately tamp down the excesses of the capital owners, along with other economic factors.
To a historian, the rise of Fascism in the US probably wouldn’t be too surprising. We had a popular Nazi movement here in the 30’s that was clamoring for power. That collapsed due to their leader embezzling funds, and it’s successors being imprisoned under the espionage act during WWII.
But as for why it’s happening again, it starts with FDR finally implementing major economic reforms that provided desperately worker and union protections, high taxes on the wealthy, and social security. Those actions were directly responsible for ending the gilded age as well as finally giving the working class a sense of hope and that life could actually get better (at least… If you weren’t a minority, life still sucked for them, hence the civil rights movement a few decades later).
However, starting in the 70’s, conservative and liberal leaders have consistently and slowly whittled away all of those working class gains from the 30’s to the 60’s.
- 70’s: Regulations on businesses and corporate tax rates are relaxed, and wages start to fall behind inflation despite higher productivity.
- 80’s: Unions are once again being busted in the under Reagan, and right-to-work laws in conservative states allow businesses to skirt unions. Union membership declines.
- 90’s: Liberal leaders do little to fix anything in the when they were in power, Neo-liberalism is really taking effect now, manufacturing jobs are drastically being outsourced aboard to take advantage of slave wages. Unions continue to bleed members, wages stagnate further.
- 2000’s: Obamacare (affordable care act) passes. It ensures people with pre-existing conditions are able to purchase health insurance (they could be denied before, so if you had cancer and didn’t already have health insurance, you and your family would go bankrupt). Overall it’s a shitty band-aid when universal healthcare is desperately needed so workers can actually attempt to unionize without having to fear losing their health insurance if they get fired for doing so. Wages remain stagnant.
- 2010: Citizens united passes in 2010, allowing corporate donors to go on unlimited spending sprees on political campaigns (they were harshly limited before). They pump pro-corporate candidates and senators full of money or non-monetary ‘gifts’
- The 2020’s: The liberal government does nothing to stop insane housing costs as corporate landlords purchase insane amounts of housing as an investment vehicle, and begin to collude with each other to keep rents unbearably high. Cost of living increases in all areas, with Covid often being an excuse by corporations even after supply chains are restored. The majority of Americans have less than $200 in savings, and would become homeless if they lose their job. Insurance premiums rise to extreme levels in some areas. Most people can barely afford to live, more and more fall into poverty. Less than 10% of US workers are unionized.
Throughout the 90’s to the present, we also had hard-right propaganda being allowed to be aired on TV (Fox News is one example), which fermented conspiracy theories for decades to an unfortunately uneducated populace.
All of that set up the perfect environment for a fascist to come in and perform their classic tactics of: blame minorities, promise a bright future, and convince their base that the left is literally evil and that they must be eliminated.
That’s glossing over a whole lot, but that’s kinda the ultra short version as to how we got here, and why it seemed to rise so quickly.
You know something that I found provided some context is the American Civil Rights movement began in 1954 and didn’t see the passage of the Civil Rights Act until 1964.
This was a time when people were being murdered over the color of their skin and it took nearly a decade to achieve their goals. Also it wasn’t as nonviolent as reported either.
But you are right things got really bad really fast. I protested at first, but have left my country and live in Europe now. I am only a student and will eventually have to go back, but I figured in 2 years when my masters degree is finished things will have either gotten so bad I can claim assylum or they have gotten better and I can go home.
I didn’t want to risk being drafted into some bullshit war. When I do go back and see family I try to keep involved, but I’m afraid things have gotten too bad to fix. After following the recent ICE shootings, next time I’m back I plan on getting a weapons permit in my state and using it to open carry at protests from now on.
Last election several individuals committed voter AND election fraud. They were all Republicans.
Let’s see ‘em in the comments if you’re inclined to display them.
More recently there’s a mayor of some town (
in Texas, iircKansas) that’s facing deportation and multiple felony charges for voting in elections as a non-citizen.I’ll link to the story posted on lemmy if I can find it!Found it! https://lemmy.ml/post/43029958
This mandates government registration to access an essential right of a citizen in a democracy. Ask for the same thing for gun ownership though and the right would lose their minds.
What’s interesting, is that many of us already do register with the state governments.
Its goal isn’t to regulate voting. It’s to suppress it.
Yep. Very easy to disenfranchise many people this way.
Particularly, anyone whose name or SAAB on their passport or birth certificate doesn’t match their photo id. Anyone who works during DMV hours and can’t take time off to renew an ID. Especially those who don’t drive (and thus don’t need a license).
So let’s see, that’s mainly women, genderqueer, and the working poor. Alright alright.
Who else?
I’m sure that a lot of the unhoused don’t have easy access to their birth certificate or passport.
Anybody who cut ties with their parents and can’t access this paperwork. So no strong family values.
Oh yeah. The millions of Americans who can’t even dream of leaving the country who never even got a passport in the first place.
How is this not a poll tax?
And I’m gonna guess that this is going to make mail in voting more difficult? Or perhaps we will have to verify our ID with an app, this getting all of our info while also removing anonymity from voting, at a time when one party is not just hostile, but downright violent towards members of the other.
How about this…the republicans get to have a poll tax if the Democrats get to have a literacy test. If we are gonna make voting harder, lets make it harder for both sides. Deal?
Obviously that’s quite tongue in cheek.
If I recall, any state that requires ID to vote has to give the ID free or it IS considered a poll tax. So this is going to put a lot of expense onto state governments without any federal funding to offset it.
That seems to be a major point of this government. Who is paying for all those national guard deployments, loss of renewable subsidies, SNAP, etc.
Crash the economy, which makes people afraid. Scared people are more likely to vote for a strongman.
True but you’d think they’d at least want a very different “strongman” than the one who did the crashing.
One would think, but a lot of people are miseducated as to the cause and effect of these things (to put it as politely as I can).
any state that requires ID to vote has to give the ID free or it IS considered a poll tax.
They’re just going to not do it. Shrug their shoulders and say “oops, not enough time to implement it but we have to have the election now” and will get a finger wagging from the Supreme Court.
Agreed. The goal is to design a system where you must prove your right to vote rather than be allowed to cast a vote with passive validation after the fact. Folks who can’t prove their right to vote are primarily low-income voters who are presumed to vote Dem.
As this is not the least restrictive means to accomplish the legitimacy of the election, it does not pass constitutional muster (good luck with the current Supreme Court though). I also wonder how this might infringe on the rights of First Nations (literally completely ignorant here) and states right to administer their own elections.
The big group this impacts is married women — in particular it has a name-matching requirement which will block a large fraction of married women from voting. They’re doing this because women have consistently been more likely to vote for Democrats than men:
This makes it very much worthwhile for Americans to ask their Senators to block this legislation by any means necessary.
What they are going to create is a world where women refuse to take their husband’s name. I’m certain the right will be up in arms over that as well. Par for the course for the poster children of unintended consequences.
If their goals were ever what they say they are, there is almost always a better policy that could drive that out come, but every time the right’s solution is “just make them.” And then big fucking Pikachu surprise when that doesn’t work out like they plan.
The goal here is to keep women from voting: the SAVE act very specifically requires that you
- Prove citizenship
- That you prove that the name on your citizenship document (eg: birth certificate) match your current name
Because women often change name when they get married, they’ll have a mismatch, and need to spend time and money to be able to vote. If the legislation passes, it will block about 20 million Americans from voting. Because of gender disparities in voting, Republicans see this as to their advantage.
Give your Senators a call at 202-224-3121 and ask them to block this change.
…except that married women overwhelmingly vote Republican.
Source? Not trying to aggravate or anything, but I just haven’t seen any statistics that bear that out. This report from Pew Research in 2025 suggests that married women are roughly split:
Married men and women are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party than their unmarried counterparts, with 59% of married men and half of married women oriented toward the GOP.
The image above this statement shows 45% of married women are Democrat-aligned whereas 50% of married women are Republican-aligned.
I’m not in the USA, but in here government ID has been a requirement to vote as long as we’ve been independent. Same goes with driving license, registration of a car, guns obviously, bank accounts and a ton of other everyday stuff and it’s not really a problem. Sure, you need to take care that specially the new ID card they hand out is valid (5 years at the time if I remember correctly) since it’s often (one might argue too often) required to validate your identity.
And when done correctly it’s mostly a good thing. Last time I voted it took maybe 10 minutes and I had several days to pick one which suits me. I gave my ID card to the clerk who then checked a box that I already voted (so that they won’t give me second ballot) and then I filled the ballot and cast my vote. That’s it. And of course there’s mechanism so that you can vote even if you’re hospitalized or out of the country or something else preventing you from voting “the normal” way.
Current government at the USA seems to do everything they can to make voting more difficult, but requiring a valid ID to do so isn’t really the biggest issue you have out there.
That the thing, and ID requirement sounds reasonable but it really isn’t in the US.
First, there is no national ID. The closest we have is out Social Security Card, but that’s just a number. There is no photo or other identifying information. Every state issues drivers licenses, but those can vary widely.
For example, Arizona drivers licenses don’t expire until the person is 65 which makes them terrible for identification purposes. Imagine looking at a driver’s license photo taken at age 16 and trying to figure out if that is the same 60 year old person standing in front of you.
There are birth certificates, but those alone aren’t positive identification either. There is no federal requirement to have one, though most people do. Still, there are about 60,000 babies born outside hospitals who may or may not ever get a birth certificate. These parents are often antigovernment and think they are doing their kids a favor by hiding them from the feds.
Then there is the issue of ID requiring a permanent address. Native American reservations do not get federal mail service, so they don’t have addresses. They use post office boxes to get mail, bit those aren’t valid for ID purposes. There are also people who live out of cars, RVs, or a simply homeless who nonetheless are citizens with a right to vote.
My partner had all their IDs lost in a fire., so I’ve gone through the process of getting a new ones and it is a nightmare. First, you need a copy of your birth certificate. But they won’t give that without some sort of proof of identity. That means we had to go to my partners gynecologist (the only doctor they had been to in this state) and get a letter swearing their identity and to their bank for proof of address. Then we could order a copy (plus fees) from their home state which we had to wait for a physical copy to be mailed.
Once that arrived, we were able to fill out the forms to get a temporary social security card (have to wait for the real one to come in the mail). After that we went to the Department of Motor Vehicles (which always has a huge wait) to present all the previous forms to get a state ID (a driver’s license would have required a written test, an eye test, and a driving test as well).
This all took us a couple hours a day for more than a week of going to various offices, being told we needed other forms, getting those forms, coming back, and so forth. Imagine trying to do that with a car, or in a rural location where offices could be an hour drive apart, or trying to do that while holding down two jobs.
The general point I am making here is that if you are poor, a minority, rurally located, or simply someone who falls outside the average, getting an ID can be a significant hurdle to the basic democratic right to vote.
That’s just wild from my perspective. In here pretty much everything works with your SSN and some way you can prove it’s yours. Healthcare, pensions, schools/education in general, taxes, benefits and nearly all publicly funded things require that you can prove you are who you claim to be. Hell, I can’t even get certain type of packages out of the post office without a valid ID.
Sure, there’s some burecrautic annoyance to actually get valid ID card or passport, but compared on what you’re saying it’s walk in the park. Last time I renewed mine it was enough to submit application for it digitally and then visit a police station to actually confirm my identity for that application, but in total with traveling it took 2-3 hours.
And also I can verify my identity online pretty easily either via my bank credentials or with a phone service. For me and a lot of other people it’s really convenient, but obviously in here we also have people who can’t (or won’t learn to) use all the new tech so for them some things have gotten more difficult.
A fun side-note is that today my driving license actually doesn’t qualify as valid identification. On some cases it’s still enough and it used to be as good as actual ID card but with a ton of EU drivers licenses from other countries around it’s not ‘strong’ enough identification anymore.
The United States works a lot more like the EU than any individual country. Each state has its own politics and leadership. Some states try to make things easier, some try to make things harder, and it can all flip from one election to another. It makes it very hard to make any kind of progress. A passport would work as ID just about anywhere, but less than half of Americans have one. I don’t (and I’ve been out of the country a couple times).
In order to legally purchase a firearm (except in a transaction between private parties) you have to fill out a federal transfer form.
If you are the type of person who cares about the government knowing you have a gun, you will certainly acquire it through a transaction between private parties.
