The point of bringing up European countries in the UHC debate was because their systems had features that proponents in the US hoped could be replicated here (Universal Coverage and slower growth of costs). Saying that the argument was “we should replicate everything in Europe in the US just because” is a pretty silly strawman.
To make the analogy in the OP work, you need some benefit of National ID cards that those cards bring to the European countries that have them that you’d like to replicate here.
FWIW, I don’t really have any problem with having a National ID card that’s freely provided to every citizen. But my views on the subject aren’t caused by anything having to do with European countries.
Hey – maybe we can learn from the U.K. both on National Health and on popular attitudes towards compulsory identification, presumably required to prevent inllegal workers!
This was intended to rebut a common argument against ID cards – that they don’t work because of their deleterious effects on freedom.
Voter identification, for one. If every person has a card that clearly identifies their citizenship, provided for them at no cost, as a matter of routine policy, then any concerns about improper voting would be substantially allayed.
While we’re at it, we might as well be like France and eat non-pasteurized soft cheese. And toss out the drinking age. When we’ve dealt with the important things, we can think about a national ID card.
OK, I guess the UK can’t yet be used as a example to show there are no problems with the cards, although they are clearly another country that’s going to have them.
We all (Americans and Europeans) need medical care, and we all need a workable healthcare funding system which can be implemented in a (mostly) market economy.
We don’t have the same expectations or traditions of personal liberty, and in some cases, we don’t guarantee the same aspects of personal liberty.
In any case, as others have noted, the comparisons with European healthcare delivery and funding models are the direct result of a perceived failing in our system; there is no such perceived failing of our identity verification system.
No they aren’t. If the incumbent government wins next week’s election, they will, but both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have pledged to repeal the legislation.
This doesn’t show that they work, it shows that they do no harm. Actually, it doesn’t even do that since it is only restricted one point. What do they achieve exactly, and is it cost effective?
I could come up with a the Mandatory IRS Photocopy plan, where the government spends millions of dollars making photocopies of everyone’s tax records and then destroying said photocopies. I could also make a case that this would “pose no undue threat to freedom”. Surely you need something more than this to be for implementing this ridiculous plan?
That is more like it! This can be legitimate benefit. I used to live in South Africa where everyone has a mandatory national Identity Document, and this document played an important role in voter registration. I believe it would have been far more difficult to have transparent elections if there was no such standardization, and every province or municipality relied on its own ID system. Needless to say such confusion would have enormous negative political consequences.
So yes, there is an advantage, and I think you can look to South Africa as an example of country where this did have an impact. No doubt it is useful for combating fraud elsewhere as well: you don’t have to carry it around with you all the time but you do need to show it when opening or closing bank accounts, applying for drivers licenses, etc. Of course its usefulness is only as strong as the integrity of the institution that issues them, and there are allegations of corruption within the Department of Home Affairs that come up from time to time.
That said, South Africa is not the United States. In South Africa we were talking about elections by 50 million people for the first time ever under immense political pressure and changes within society. The institutions involved were being tested like never before, and the pressure and opportunity for voter fraud is not likely to be easily comparable to the United States in its present form.
So getting back to your main point - what does Europe have to tell us? Tell us about how voter fraud has been diminished by national ID cards in Europe. I agree that their experiences with this issue are relevant and should be part of the feasibility study. That seems obvious, although it is equally obvious to me that it wouldn’t be the only factor.
Okay, so now we have something to debate. How do national ID cards solve this problem better then existing ID cards, particularly since identification is not even mandatory to vote in all states? Why should ID even be mandatory? Isn’t most of voter fraud through absentee ballots? How would you mandate ID for absentee voters?
ID should be mandatory to ensure that only citizens vote.
I don’t know if most cases of fraud are through absentee ballots. Presumably we would mandate the registering for an absentee ballot involve some form of identity verification.
I may as well add my personal feelings about a national ID card in the United States.
I actually have zero issues with everyone having to have an ID card once everyone actually has them. I don’t think South Africa is any less freer than the United States because it has a mandatory ID card. The key issue for me is the transition from no IDs to mandatory IDs - in South Africa it was a no-brainer to use the existing ID documents for voter registration: practically everyone already had them and there wasn’t any real issues of disenfranchisement due to not being able to get one easily.
In the United States currently no-one has a national ID card, meaning there needs to be a process for mass allocation and distribution. The details of this process are very important. Firstly, the card needs to be free, otherwise we are in effect implementing a poll tax, something I am strongly against. Secondly, the process for obtaining the card must take into account differences in mobility between different segments of the population. If we simply state that you have to go stand in line at the new National ID office for half the day similar to a DMV then we have a real issue: this will be harder to do for the immobile, or for shift workers, etc. If this affects one group more than another people are going to feel disenfranchised, and that will make this a political nonstarter.
If these issues can be resolved I don’t have any issues with mandatory ID cards used for voter registration. In the long run it would be better if we don’t have to rely on social security numbers for as much as we do, since those numbers are clearly used for much more than they were designed for and are horribly insecure, so there are additional benefits as well.
Advocates of this need to understand one thing: transitioning from no card to a mandatory card will be expensive, and the costs need to be born by the government (in effect the taxpayers at large). That means we need a clear understanding of the benefits: it isn’t enough to say “this will help combat voter fraud”. We’d need to see evidence of wide spread voter fraud that could be resolved with this scheme as opposed to a cheaper scheme. To make the transition politically palatable we would also need to see evidence that we will not be disenfranchising legitimate voters who want to vote, in particular in a particular direction based on race, wealth, health, etc.
In one sense a mandatory ID card used for government services across the board is better than simply a card that is optional, but required for voting. The mandatory attribute puts the ball in the government’s court in terms of ensuring everyone has one. It needs to make the effort to ensure that people confined to elderly care facilities or other such institutions are catered for, rather than simply saying “oh, you want to vote? Take the afternoon off work and stand in line at the office”.
This OP is completely illogical. With health care, the stated goal was universal coverage. Then people looked at health care systems around the world and also looked at different parts of our health care system to see how universal coverage can be achieved (and each country takes a different approach to achieving universal coverage). Finally, Congress implemented a system that is more-or-less a hybrid between the previous US system and the Swiss system.
Now, after some prodding, Bricker has stated a goal: to reduce or eliminate voter fraud. If he wanted to take the approach we took with health care, he would examine various countries around the world and see what their approaches are as a whole to reducing or eliminating voter fraud. That could include a national ID, but I’d be surprised if that was the sole extent of any particular country’s solution. So, all Bricker has done is thrown out one possible solution to an identified problem and then try to claim that such an approach bears any similarity to the approach taken with universal coverage. He has taken the opposite approach to the approach taken in the health care debates.
I’ll also add that the anti-universal coverage people were also making comparisons to the UHC countries during the debate, but their comparisons were negative (e.g., wait times). And they were making positive comparisons to countries with primarily free-market health systems (such as the US prior to the establishment of Medicare/Medicaid or India). So, since these comparisons were used for every position in the health care debate, about all we can say is that pretty much anyone who had an opinion about health care should be okay with examining other countries’ voting systems. So, since, I had an opinion about health care, if you want to convince me that another country’s system of reducing voter fraud works, I will be completely okay with examining that system to see how they did it.
Voting fraud is pure hokum. Its an absurdity, just on the face of it. In order to commit honest to badness voter fraud, rather than some skulduggery in vote counting, the pool of co-conspirators gets ridiculously large: if you were going to influence a race by a thousand votes, committed by individual fraudulent registrations and voting, you’d need a minimum of a hundred people to do the actual voting!
And if you could figure out a delivery route that would bring each of them to another polling station within minutes of committing such fraud…you would most likely have to stand in line. The logistics of moving less than a hundred people around in such a way as to commit a thousand fraudulent votes is absurd. And that would be even if everything else worked! Given wait times, you might very well need several hundred scoundrels, to even affect a thousand vote margin.
Plus the crime must not only be committed in broad daylight, but under the jealous and watchful eye of whatever political opposition may be at hand. And little gets the attention of such eyes as an inexplicable shift in political demographics, a thousand Republican voters suddenly appearing gets noticed.
The ongoing Republican effort to make voting as tiresome, tedious and difficult as possible is rooted in the obvious fact that the more poor people who vote, the more tenuous their position becomes. The orchestrated murder of ACORN speaks plainly.
Well, I have no problem discussing voter fraud, although my goal is to make sure that voting for eligible voters only is as easy as possible. So, if someone could propose a scheme which eliminated voter fraud while at the same time making it as easy as possible for eligible citizens to vote, I would have no problem with it. But I agree, a lot of schemes only seem to tackle the voter fraud aspect while ignoring the ease of voting aspect.
Rather than making the card compulsory, how about making it desirable? Leave it as a voluntary thing, let people get used to the idea, let suspicious persons (such as myself) have plenty of time to see the thing in action.
OK, so the card establishes identity and citizenship. Which would also mean that “wants and warrants” could be easily checked as well. Which should mean that if you are required to show your papers by anybody, and you check out, then you walk. Period.
Thus, we have an alternative for any person who may feel, for whatever reason, that he might be subject to such a, ah, misunderstanding. He would apply for the id, he would want it.
It could also function as a “debit card” for working poor, who have no bank account. A young person might find it a handy way of proving age. Attach minor conveniences to the possession of the card, that sort of thing.
You see, you draw more flies with honey than with vinegar. Of course, shit works best of all, but that’s not what my analogy is about.