I had another version of this at the DMV. They needed to see bills that offered proof of my residence (ie power/water/etc). Turns out they wanted them to be mailed to you, which wasn't going to work because I do paperless billing for everything. So I printed them out and tri-folded them as if it had been in an envelope.
People in front of me in line got turned away for using printed bills, but mine worked just fine.
Yes, they also do this for ID's, and for voter ID's. It's specifically created to prevent people whom don't have only 1 permanent address,with paper billing, being able to live their daily lives. I had to go to a local county courthouse 4 times to get a "realid" and to renew a driver's license. I had to call all sorts of people to get printed statements sent to me. It's incredibly ridiculous, I would call it completely contrary to the ethos of the United States, even. That as a citizen with all these forms of ID I still cannot readily operate as a citizen in my own country.
I think the mechanism is indirect. After 9/11, Congress wanted to make it difficult to falsify IDs. The optimization was to maximize the probability that an ID is real and correct if an ID is presented to board a plane. Unfortunately there’s was no constraint that the process shouldn’t prevent people from getting IDs or make it easy. Poor people don’t have enough of a voice for Congress to care.
I also know directly from people running state DMV offices (and also coincidentally or not, in the official GOP power structure) that there was a serious effort for drivers licenses from all states to be more standardized and validated by the process that became RealID.
This was around 1995-7, so 9/11 had zero infuence on the origin of this idea, although it likely helped provide justification for it.
That said, I find it mildly interesting that it took at least two decades to even begin to roll out from serious discussions in the corridors of power to actual changes affecting the drivers and voters.
I wonder if it took two decades because it was an unfunded rider to an Iraq war emergency spending bill added with next to no discussion in Congress. Yes, I'm annoyed, but I imagine the lack of enthusiasm many others shared at the time contributed to the dilatory implementation.
I'm pretty sure terrorists have access to both printers and the gimp. Requiring a mailed bill seems like it would only hinder people who are honest. I highly doubt terrorists are opposed to lying.
Actually poor people are well represented. Witness the trillions of dollars of debt the US is in, the countless duplicative entitlement programs subsidizing food, health care, housing, schooling, etc. Politicians don't get elected unless they give other people's money away to those who don't have it and the poor by definition do not have money to give away but they do vote. Sometimes like here a minor fraud prevention rule slips by like address corroboration but it quickly becomes obsolete because bureaucratic efficiency and modernism is not what government does best.
You completely ignore multiple studies showing that in 80-95% of legislative actions, the action is the one favored by large corporations and NOT the action favored by people or poor people.
IOW, the US legislature is responsive to people and especially poor people only 5-20% of the time.
I wouldn't say it's intentionally designed to do this, but that it's a consequence. There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design.
> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor,
This seems naive to the point of being bizarre. Employers of lower skill and lower margin labor can get it cheaper if their prospective employees are more desperate and thus have less bargaining power. Low wages are the gift that keeps on giving because it keeps your prospective workers from saving enough to weather the risk of negotiating harder, quitting to look for better pay, etc.
If you look at places that have policies that seem to keep the poor down vs places less so, there's at least some clear correlation in terms of who the major employers with more influence in the state are -- those who rely more heavily on cheaper labor with lower profit margins, vs those who are much less exposed to that due to having higher profit margins or less of their costs come from commodity labor.
Just think about what the biggest businesses might be in say, Oklahoma versus New Jersey.
Another way to bring this point home, compare a middle class family in say, Mexico or India, to say, California or New York. Inequality is higher so the cost of basic labor is cheaper, which translates to people with the same middle class job in a place like Mexico or India being able to easily afford a lot more of the sorts of labor intensive services only wealthier people would have in much of the US, like a live in maid/cook, taking a long taxi trip to and from work 5 days a week, etc, stuff that a middle class person in the US would need to ration a lot more even if they do take some ubers here and there and eat out here and then.
There is, on the other hand, a strong incentive to keep poor people from getting ID. If you don't have ID you can still mostly do the peasant work that is required for those in power to stay in power but you can't remove them from power by voting because those in power are increasingly linking the ability to vote with the ability to get documentation which they are continuously working to make it more difficult for poor people to get.
Reap all the benefits of the slaves doing their work, avoid any of the downsides of having to actually listen to their needs.
Is this your true belief? Do you really 1: conceive of anyone without an ID as a "slave," and 2: believe that things like Real ID laws, which are broadly supported by 80% of citizens[0] are here just to keep the poor down?
This seems utterly inflammatory, and somewhat divorced from reality. I absolutely understand systems thinking, and specifically can see the argument for posiwid here, but even then... This sort of conspiracy thinking strikes me as profoundly not useful.
Before attributing laws requiring IDs to the evil evil overlords, first ask yourself why 80% of citizens approve of these laws? Is everybody just all working to keep a tiny group of people down? Might it instead be that complex systems have edge cases and people who are already on the margins of society hit these edge cases more? The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs, but obviously we can't fix a global conspiracy, so I'd really like to know which I'm dealing with. If it is a conspiracy this makes it seem like there's nothing I can do to solve the problem.
I concur that the GP was a bit dramatic in their use of the term "Slave," but they raised a valid point.
Voter suppression is a real thing in the United States. It's a strategy often used to hold and retain power by the minority (often richer, privileged) party
> Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like strict voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. These measures disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote.
" The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs "..
These problems can be fixed, but they require effort by all citizens to vote and put pressure to make voting equitable.
Fortunately I live in New Zealand so our democracy is quite healthy, though it could always be better.
Purging voter lists is not suppression unless you view dead people or those who have moved out of the voting jurisdiction on the voting rolls as legitimate voters. No different than a company purging email or address lists of outdated names
> unless you view dead people or those who have moved out of the voting jurisdiction on the voting rolls as legitimate voters
Unless the purge is over-enthusiastic, with unrealistically high barriers to re-entry. It’s not a problem for someone who has all the documents and the time to jump through all the hoops (or someone to do it for them), and a sympathetic administration with an office close enough that you can go there without taking a day off. Assuming you have days off at all. It’s quite harder otherwise. The result is a disproportionally large fraction of “undesirables” (poor and living in specific areas) being disenfranchised.
But the fake IDs we had before Real IDs were also fine. Was there a lot of fraud with the fake IDs ? You had to give one address proof earlier, and now you need to give two. What's the advantage of that ? A lot of post 9/11 measures have questionable use (e.g., TSA). People approve all sorts of nonsense when they are not being rational.
Absolutely it's a sincere belief. "Slave" is hyperbole, but only just barely.
The link you posted indicates that 80% of people think it's reasonable to show ID at a polling station. I think you'd find that's a pretty common opinion on it's face because it's perfectly reasonable to show ID to do things like vote or get social security benefits or register property you own or all those government-y things.
The trouble comes when you hijack that perfectly reasonable expectation by then making ID preferentially difficult to get for certain classes of people. You don't need to trust that this is the case - it's apparent from the statistics. More than 10% of adult US citizens don't have ID. Why not? Because it takes time and money - you need to pay fees, you need to travel, you need underlying documents that can sometimes take hundreds of dollars of fees themselves to generate, etc. Politicians also can 'tune' what counts as ID to preselect the voters they want. TX for example, counts concealed carry cards as ID but does not count student IDs.
In fact, in 2014 the GAO itself found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by at least 2-3 percentage points on average with significantly higher proportions in economically depressed and racially diverse areas, and it's well documented that the people impacted by that lower turnout are overwhelmingly members of specific demographics that tend to vote for specific policies. That's a pretty big incentive to marginalize these people if you don't agree with those policies.
It's undeniable that for many of the most vulnerable and powerless members of society obtaining ID under the current regime is in direct conflict with simple survival, and is unlikely to be a priority. If we want to require ID for voting we should make the process of obtaining that ID require as little economic power as possible - a task that is easily within our grasp.
How does this work? You don't just go to local city hall or similar office to get a free ID when you turn particular age (15 in my country)? What is required to get an ID?
What’s happening with voter suppression in the US today is contrary to that. Many people are petty and callous. It’s reality. They literally want everyone they don’t like to leave.
This is a common belief that, to me, displays a serious lack of knowledge of the breadth of human experience. It should not be hard to imagine how people who are some combination of very sick, old, lonely, disabled or poor can have their ID expire and then not get a new one for year after year. Yet people seem to constantly proclaim this as unthinkable or nonsensical, as if only their version of a lived life is believable.
Some countries make it work. The key is to make the mandatory IDs free and easy to obtain. It’s not that difficult. When I need to renew my ID here in <random European country> I need a 20 minutes appointment, any document can be printed there so there is no issue with pdf and no need to fake a mail. Nothing to pay as well.
For the driver’s licence it was even easier, I just had to upload a photo and a pdf bill as a proof of address on a government web server, and I had it in the mail 3 weeks later.
Voting is a fundamental right. If you are going to require IDs for it, it follows that IDs are a fundamental right, and making them arbitrarily difficult to obtain is capricious, discriminatory and should be considered unconstitutional in a sane democracy.
It's not just requiring ID, it's closing polling places, discarding mail-in ballots, and a whole host of techniques designed to "ensure the quality of voters". And these techniques disproportionately affect voters of color and the poor.
Also when I was a kid (20 years ago) no ID was required to vote. Actual voter fraud is incredibly, vanishingly rare. But the lie that it is common is used to drum up support for these regressive measures.
Not to mention having biased election volunteers look at your ID and deem it fake or a "different signature." You can take them to court, but by then the election is over, so it doesn't matter. There's so many ways for the Republicans to corrupt the vote and they've had great success in doing so thus far, so why not go deeper down that path? Who is going to stop them? Democrats who even with a majority can't get a caucus going due to there always being conservative democrats who are pretty much republicans and loyal to republican causes.
I'm astonished that anyone would advocate for voting without some sort of Id. If you cant drink, drive or get a library card without an ID you shouldn't be able to vote. The Id laws that states do have on the books are incredibly liberal in what type of Id is acceptable to vote . Texas, a state lots of people are quick to assert has suppressive voter ID laws, doesn't even require a picture ID or original documents. In fact even a copy of a utility bill is acceptable: https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/poster-8.5x14...
I'm not really advocating for it, but I am pointing out that for whatever reason this was apparently the way things were done in the USA for voting for a long time. So as astonishing as it may seem on the face of it, there is some historical precedent that it is actually a very normal idea.
But as I said, this is not just about IDs. There are a whole host of laws being introduced, typically by republicans, that do definitely have the effect of disenfranchising poor people and people of color, who tend to be the political opponents of the people introducing the laws.
Closing poll places for example. They will suggest closing down polling places in poor neighborhoods, using some extremely thin disguise over their motives. It seems obvious to any person who believes in one person, one vote, that the color of your skin or the amount of money in your bank account is no reason to degrade someone's ability to vote. But we see long lines at polling places, where some people have to stand in line for many hours to vote! An obvious failure of democracy.
And they strike voters off of voter roles, going after people with hispanic names for example, finding a "Rosalind Sanchez" and a "Rosa Sanchez" in some city and deciding, based on that information alone, that this is a "duplicate voter" and disqualifying one voter's vote from being counted.
There is a transparent effort to block people from voting, and voting with ID is used as a talking point to steer the conversation away from the more egregious side of their efforts.
It gets weird as an expat. I can’t get a realID because I don’t have an address in my “resident” state (the one I file a tax return in every year). When I visit and use my old drivers license people tell me it’s fake. So I go and come back with my passport. They’ve never seen one of those before, so they start to get cagey. I ask if my sharing my old military id that is expired might help them believe I am who I say I am and that I was born on X date. Sure, they say. But it’s expired so they don’t care. We return 20 minutes later with a friend who can buy the alcohol.
Voting is looking like it’s getting even more convoluted for the next election. In all, I feel less and less like my home country even wants me to come back eventually.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social engineering project? If the goal is find a way to ensure burgers are flipped and toilets cleaned, wouldn't the rational idea be to invest in robotics and involuntary birth control technology, not try to ride herd on a giant mob of poor people who might turn on their "masters'" at any point?
For that matter, if you are one of the masters of the Universe, why do you even need the poor people who only interact with other poor people? If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today?
Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear?
It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with.
> Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social engineering project?
It’s not super complicated, it’s just the natural consequence of an elite in power wanting to stay that way. You can see it as some kind of class behaviour. It has been going on since as far back as we can see, e.g. in Ancient Greek and Roman societies. People are being replaced by robots, as soon as it makes financial sense. This itself is really not new, and has caused issues since the start of the industrial revolution (see the various textile labourers strikes over the last 2 or 3 centuries).
> If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today?
It’s uncoordinated because it isn’t actually a large conspiracy by a couple of evil masters of the world. It’s a result of everyone in a position of power acting it their own self interest over time.
> Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear?
Mechanisation has been a more and more realistic strategy, but this is very recent. You still need people to make stuff. Also, “the underclass” is not going to disappear on its own.
> It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with.
Exactly. That, and the fact that some people’s hopes and dreams depend on them exploiting other people.
I really appreciate this response and will come back to say more when I'm awake, but just want to acknowledge that you have interesting stuff to say and I want to hear more. Thank you.
Who is "We" and how do they coordinate this? Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy (Usually. Occasionally governments intentionally wage "war" on a group of people, but this is not the typical case.).
> Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy
Except that when everyone knows what a poverty trap is, how they form, how to spot them, and what to do about them, and none of that gets done, we start to fall on the opposite side of Hanlon’s razor. It’s not like that scholarship is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem?
Everyone knows what lightning is, when it forms, what to do about it (go inside), and why it's dangerous. Yet still, somehow, people get struck by lightning. It's not like this knowledge is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem?
Does this clarify things a bit? I'd like to find a better rhetorical method than just swapping out terms, but it really does highlight the point here. Can we conclude that government is trying to kill people just because some people still get struck by lightning? Alternatively, what would the government need to do to prevent anyone from ever getting struck? Now consider all the different ways people can end up poor, and project this infrastructure out to ensuring that that can never, ever happen. Should we have better methods to handle it when it does? Probably! Does the fact that poverty traps exist mean that people explicitly set them up? Probably not!
Many poverty traps exist because they can be a lucrative enterprise. People in poverty are generally the most vulnerable to begin with.
Curbing people's ability to leverage poverty traps for profit in a capitalist system would reduce how many people get stuck in them.
In general, government legislation can and does directly affect poverty rates as well as who is most likely to be affected.
People will argue about the effectiveness and intent of government actions to ameliorate/impose poverty. Claiming that it is outside of a government's influence is nonsense.
People just don't believe me when I tell them how hard it is to get an ID.
I can tell its all very well intentioned, I can understand how and why all the rules came to exist, it still has the net result of making the poor, poorer.
You haven't looked at one of the major parties very closely, then. They've got a 50 year history of doing exactly what you claim there's no good reason to do.
The reason the poor are discriminated against is to keep them poor. It’s pretty straightforward and often so reflexively implemented that it leaves room for someone to falsely claim it’s an unintended consequence.
You're misguided if you think there is any sort of design behind this.
This is just bureaucracy expanding and slowly taking over a working nation.
The unproductive members of society slowly winning over the productive ones and setting up rules to justify their comfortable existence.
The same happened in most countries and won't die until the government itself dies (because a government never makes itself smaller) and a new society replaces it.
I don't think the process of getting an ID is optimal but it is not an excuse for having lax ID requirement rules either, which is an argument I often hear.
If all this was for is to ensure you live at an address then the local government can offer a number of solutions to that. If they want mail, they can simply mail you a unique qr code which you could then scan and complete the process entirely online. Or at a minimum bring physically to an office.
A utility bill doesn't require proof of residency to get. Neither does a credit card statement. Infact if I were creative I could say I live anywhere and provide false documents of that. It is the legitimate use of this system that is difficult, not illigitimate use.
The system is not designed to be secure or to ensure residency, that's not it's purpose. Its purpose is to create further government control to suppress citizens rights to operate freeley in their own country. Specifically, to target low income individuals. These people creating the policies are not the same people whom are affected by them.
If I am U.S. born I have a right to operate in certain capacities as a citizen. Voting, owning land, and working are all rights unalienable. The fact this is not currently true is proof of the federal fascism we live in.
If you go to my local library and tell them you want a library card, but you don't have any ID, they ask you to give them your address. They send you a postcard, and when you bring it in, they'll give you a library card. No QR code necessary.
The USPS could function quite successfully as an ID system and a bank, were they allowed.
In fact postal services in many countries do function as banks. When I was a primary school student in South Korea, we all made a savings account at the local post office and learned about how banks work and the importance of saving money.
I've never understood this. There doesn't seem to be a natural synergy between delivering mail and storing money. Is it just because post offices are everywhere? Why not make court houses banks? At least they would have security. Or town halls?
Because in some countries it is/was rather common to receive payments (most often pension payments) in cash that where delivered by the postman. That's why it makes sense in a way.
1. Court Houses are not everywhere like Postal offices
2. Court houses are not part of the Executive Branch, where as a Service like the Postal Service or banking would need to be part of the Executive Branch, not Judicial. A Better counter would be DMV or some other government service.
3. Court Houses are not nearly as accessible and are much harder to get in and out of due to their nature. Not consumer friendly
4. Court Houses by the nature have alot of criminals going in and out of them all the time, probably a bad idea to put money services in the same place....
for the record I do not support the idea of USPS being a bank either.
Post offices have to be able to handle money orders paid for in cash, so I guess they already have the infrastructure to do a significant subset of bank-like things. At least with respect to document authentication and cash management.
This is what California did for RealID when they made a mistake early on. Federal government didn’t recognize one of two forms of verification California used and California mailed a post card to those affected. Was able to just go online with the code and verify receipt of the card.
Wikipedia had a pretty good summary of implementation in different countries[0]. It seems most implementations are stopped because of privatization efforts, but the blurbs don't give much context.
I can see people having different opinions of this trend. What is your take on it?
I agree with everything you're saying, but disagree with the reason.
The US federal government has to be too loose about keeping track of citizens specifically to avoid looking too fascist. One of your many American rights is to have no ID at all. Protecting that right for two dozen people makes everything extremely complicated for the rest of us.
The federal government is not too loose in tracking citizens, and you cannot effectively operate in the U.S. without I.D of some form. Birth certificates and tax ID's are necessary for everything from school to work. Infact those that forgo it originally struggle as adults heavily to get those documents later, if at all.
It’s probably true that you can’t operate properly without an ID, and yet the US government is specifically avoiding the one necessary prerequisite to having reliable and convenient IDs: a complete list of its citizens, with place of residence and a mandatory assigned unique identifier.
It fuck people coming and going. You can’t get an ID if you don’t have a place of residence, and yet you can’t just go about your business without an ID.
The point isn't to prevent a skilled attacker. The point is to prevent casual lying and low-skill fraud. Most people who lie/cheat/steal do so because it's easy or because they're dumb. Your QR code idea will cost more money to implement and won't block skilled attackers either, as it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way to get mail from a mailbox you don't own.
Utility bills are the DMV's equivalent of a cheap lock. A smart attacker can pick the lock, and a determined attacker can cut it off. But the majority of thieves are walking around looking for unlocked car doors instead.
Do you really think DMV asks for a copy of a utility bill because it's a good way to suppress your rights? I would think that there are plenty of more effective ways to do so, if that were actually their goal.
Do you think low skilled fraud doesn't have access to a printer? If it cannot be implemented properly, then it shouldn't be done at all. It doesn't matter what good intent it may have had, in effect it is a suppression of individual rights. This entire process would be grounds for a civil war in the 1800's. Yet today we think being a citizen isn't enough to have rights. You have to be apart of a socioeconomics nomic class of people to have those rights.
The DMV complies with whatever regulations are imposed on them. Those rules are created by legislators whom are entirely disconnected from their constituents and are paid for their votes.
Yes, there are absolutely people who do not have the equipment or ability to fake a document.
> If it cannot be implemented properly, then it shouldn't be done at all.
Perfectionist fallacy. I can't think of any civic requirements that are perfect. We always compromise on perfection because our civic processes also have to be reasonable.
> it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way to get mail from a mailbox you don't own
iirc stealing other people’s mail by tampering with a mailbox is a ~~felony~~ federal crime. If they threw out the mail and you went through their trash it might be different. I anal though.
>they can simply mail you a unique qr code which you could then scan and complete the process entirely online. Or at a minimum bring physically to an office.
How is that any different than bringing any other piece of official mail that you receive at your home address?
Because it actually validates your address. Plenty of “official mail that you receive at your home address” can be accessed (or produced) without access to the listed address, but you can't spoof knowing information that you never received.
If you want to make it as easy as possible to vote, you can't have a permanent address requirement as such. As has been said, many, many people don't have one.
When you move to a new state, I suppose you don't fill in a bunch of forms to register yourself as a resident in the state then? So that when DMV and other institutions ask for residency they could just check back in the states records (or have you bring a copy of the state's residency certificate) ?
The state surely must know how to tax you, and thus they need to know who you are and that you're a resident in the state... It seems the information inevitably must be there already so why try to imitate that with a bunch of random tokens such as bills sent to an address where they could go straight to the source?
In the US, no, you don't need to fill out any forms to register yourself as a resident. The closest is probably moving your drivers license registration, which many people wait years to do after moving. Other than that, you generally prove residency by showing (as GP mentioned) bills mailed to you, or a copy of your lease.
You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based on when/how/where you worked.
> The closest is probably moving your drivers license registration, which many people wait years to do after moving.
Most states do require by law that you do this in a very short period of time after moving. (Although yes, it is not uncommon for people to violate this)
There's also the state v. federal political issue of the interstate commerce clause. Some municipalities in the pretty far past have tried to restrict people moving there by creating onerous registration barriers that were then struck down by the feds. They're allowed some leeway there, but there's a limit that they don't want to push and the feds are more than happy to enforce their power.
My state (CO) semi recently hit a morph of this concern because they had "pioneer" license plates that cost an extra $100 or so and were only available to people who could prove N generations of ancestry in CO. The feds struck that down as .gov services provided being dependent on state origin and therefore against the interstate commerce clause.
As a Colorado born kid, I always thought the pioneer plates were the ultimate form of the "Native" bumper sticker. Mind you, I think that basing your identity on where your mother happened to be when she gave birth is exceptionally stupid.
That said, Florida can take Rep. Boebert back at any point.
It’s also that there are different standards of requirements across the thousands of different government entities that care about residency. And there’s not much chance they’d agree.
My municipal tax authority and the US State department may have very different standards for validating “residency” and very different reasons for doing so.
I hope you mind me not asking but while I know on some general level how things work in the US the details are infinitely interesting the deeper I think about this.
You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based on when/how/where you worked.
This seems like having so many knots left untied, considering how much importance one might expect to be placed for a fundamental question such as residency.
The obvious case is that it seems like people could just move into a state and never tell anyone and omit paying taxes. While there must be mechanisms to prevent or curb this, it still probably applies to a non-trivial minority of so-inclined people already? Not an option for people who want to settle, of course, but for certain people, living some months or years anonymously in a particular state might be a viable opportunity.
Do counties / cities / towns also lack similar logging of identity? How can they offer public services to people if they really don't know who the people are, and most importantly, if the people are residents or not? Does everyone just keep showing their utility bills? How do they deal with the various John Smiths moving from place to place -- inevitably to addresses where another John Smith was living before as there will be collisions without an unique identity? Or does the driving license become the de-facto proof of residence once people move it over, and the driving license has a unique number to differentiate between individuals regardless of name and address?
I mean, for the state government there's an inevitable and pragmatic need for uniquely identifying the people who live in the state and if there's no central registry then this need will be approxximated by various mechanisms so that the society can function at all.
Conversely, let's say the government does track down residents who nobody officially knows about. If the state government really doesn't know who lives in that state how could they impose liabilities such as taxes onto people whose identity and location and length of official residence they don't know? If I move in with my friend who lives in another state at which point can I still say "I'm just visiting, no taxes me for, thank you" and if the state were to disagree how would they go about establishing I was a resident after all? How would I prove I'm still actually a resident in the old state (if I were) vs how could they prove I'm no longer a resident in the old state (if I weren't)? What is the mechanism that prevents me from living in two states and claiming always in one that I'm resident in the other state?
I wish, but I don't think each of many departments talk or share individual's personal data between them, unless its collections or something. Like, DMV would not have access to one's tax status or details, and tax one's might not know one's driving license details. I wish the willpower & technology increases to make it happen.
But given how easy it is to foil, I don't understand what it "authenticates".
If you wanted to truly authenticate residency or at the very least prove that someone has access to the mailbox, sending them a one-time auth code per mail would be a better idea rather than relying on third-party services where people may use paperless billing for convenience.
I explicitly said it was not good authentication. :)
Mailing someone a code would be more secure but, to the parents point, would be even more onerous of a process for people to comply with.
Some comments above suggested above that this is an intentionally burdensome process, but to the contrary, bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways to authenticate residency.
> bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways to authenticate residency
My problem with this is how is the recipient supposed to authenticate said bill. Now we're talking about bringing a paper bill vs a printed one (or "faking" a paper bill by creasing/folding the printed one), but the real threat is fraudsters completely making up a fake bill to begin with. Unless the recipient has a relationship with the company that issues the bills, there is no way for them to verify whether the bill is real in the first place, making the whole endeavor pointless and only inconveniencing legitimate users.
Yes. There’s no question that a bill is a weak piece of evidence for residency. I am sure it only prevents low-effort or low-skill fraudsters, or casual fibs.
The latter is probably where they get the most utility out of these requirements.
Requiring people to print out a paper and fold it as if it had been in an envelope doesn't authenticate anything but access to a printer and some imagination. Just removing the requirement would be a better alternative.
> The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives.
"No-one important enough is bothered, so we haven't had to try to fix it" is a far cry from "there [aren't] any better alternatives". We're HN; that's not the hacker ethos.
RealID requirements were written in the past and exist in the present. While it would be great to have another solution, one doesn’t exist. Happy to hear a proposal, however. I, personally, haven’t been able to come up with a more equitable idea.
Why do you need to authenticate it in the first place? If people are discovered lying somehow, send them to jail. Otherwise, trust that people will be honest.
Fraud is not nearly the problem people think it is...
Isn't this just a consequence of inefficient government? These people don't get paid enough to care about their job to make a great experience for people. My friends working in government all say it's near impossible to get fired. It's why reasonable people try to not give more power to the government than they should.
> I had to go to a local county courthouse 4 times to get a "realid" and to renew a driver's license.
If you have a passport... no need for a "real ID" driver license.
If you don't like having to carry that big book around, other solutions include a federal passport card (USD 65) [1]. Same size, so fits in wallet. Bonus is it does not have my address on it, nor does it show what state I live in.
If you're a legal non-citizen, you can use the passport of your home country (which you're required to have in the USA, and should carry with you when you travel anyway).
Similar issue at our version of the DMV, the Traffic Department.
Had to provide proof of address and the only thing I had was the rental agreement with my landlord. But the copy I had was signed by me, but not countersigned by my landlord.
The clerk didn't want to accept it. I told him I could just walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He paused and then accepted it.
> I told him I could just walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He paused and then accepted it.
Well, I mean, forgery is a class C felony, at least in my state. If you had walked in with the signature on it, the clerk would have had plausible deniability. Your act of forging in front of the clerk took the plausible deniability away, making them complicit to a felony.
You're really lucky they accepted it. They had no good reason to take on that legal risk.
I was worried about this when I got my RealID in CA, but I printed stuff out and took it in. I use heavy printer paper and I printed it in color on a laser printer, so maybe that's why it worked? Who knows. This policy is just insane.
It's so insane that this is the state of things. For some documents I have to sign they have to be printed out and signed with ink, and then scanned and not taken a picture of.
Why?
This is obviously way less safe than using digital signatures, which are bound to me by SSO. Anyone could sign any document with a fake signature that looks just like mine, it would be very hard for them to do a digital signature associated with my account.
I get so much paper mail it's insane. Paper mail that I'm supposed to respond to with more paper mail.
It's intellectual laziness. Bureaucrats presume that paper, feeling more "solid" than a digital copy of something, is somehow more secure.
I've run across this many times when people use the word "best practices". The most safe thing is often breaking convention, so "best practices" becomes the unsafe thing everyone has done for years, even when it's _not_ industry standard or a good idea.
> They needed to see bills that offered proof of my residence (ie power/water/etc). Turns out they wanted them to be mailed to you,
What state? Certainly, that's neither in the Federal REAL ID requirements (more stringent than most preexisting state requirements) nor most states implementation of REAL ID (which can be narrower than what REAL ID allows.)
E.g., California, for REAL ID, requires documents (not necessarily bills, though those are among the things explicitly on the list of acceptable documents) that are printed (not necessarily mailed) and show the physical address.
I've made a couple attempts in the past to learn why proof of one's address was considered important in the REAL ID spec yet proof that is (and was in 2001) often easier to fake than obtain honestly is accepted. Each time I've come up short. Previous state IDs I got in two states did not demand any proof of my address that I can recall.
Is there a good explanation of the reasoning behind this requirement documented somewhere?
Which is crazy, because those would be trivially easy to fake.
And then REAL ID is considered as reliable as a passport (except to fly internationally, of course), so you've bumped up the level of trust a huge amount with one simple edited printout of a bill.
When I was applying for driver's license, I could use a printed webpage of my bank report. Which is trivial to fake, because you can just edit the address in the HTML to whatever you like and print it. I could also use a renting agreement, which of course, is also trivial to fake since they don't verify with the landlord.
I think they just don't actually care where you live that much. And since they'll mail your card to that address, that place has to be associated with you somehow.
New York is possibly more lenient on these things, but after scrolling on the website I realized they allowed anything postmarked to you at the address. Fortunately I had just gotten a thank-you card in the mail with my name and address on it and that was accepted for 1 of 2 proofs of address for my RealID. And the second was just a form I signed that said I lived there, given to me by the DMV clerk when I was there.
I glanced at another state out of curiosity and it seemed stricter.
Get a color laser printer and print out whatever you’d like. Anybody that sees a crisp color printed paper will assume it was actually mailed to you.
Another tip if you need “proof of address” is to use any notice from your State that your license or other paperwork is expiring. They’re a government agency, the paper is printed on their letterhead, and it’s addressed to you at the address you’re already trying to establish!
If you do not have a physical address (e.g., live on a boat / in an RV), our local DMV will tell you to use the street address of a local homeless shelter.
This probably won't get you past the requirement of utility bills in your name at that address to get a "Real ID" that allows domestic flights without a passport, though.
Same thing for getting a PO box, you need a physical address first. The post office will tell you the same thing, to use the address of a homeless shelter.
The folks writing these laws do not live in vans, and do not care, nor even think about the impact of their actions on folks with alternative living arrangements / folks poorer than they are.
What if you're living in a van because #vanlife and you want to drive around the country nomadically for a couple years and not because you are actually financially qualified to be homeless?
Like, what if you are a millionaire living in a fancy RV driving around national parks for a couple years?
Former van-denizen here. I always used friends' addresses (with their permission, for a limited amount of time) when I needed to get important docs or plates. Usually it's not too hard to find someone to let you receive some mail at their house. Utility bills were always a problem for me, but there are usually ways around. Proof of filing a tax return in-state is enough in most cases, even if you're not "at" that address anymore.
Then you rent a $500/mo bedroom somewhere, sleep in it once so it's not fraud to call it your residence, and have the roommates put the utilities in your name.
Now you have a residence address and utility bills in your name to your residence address, and you can get a driver's license there, just like a real boy.
Do you really think wealthy people (who are naturally at risk of kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, threats against family, etc) have their driver's license address pointing to the place where their children sleep at night?
The DMV gives those records in bulk to third parties. It's as good as public. Additionally, every dumbfuck services vendor from a gym to a daycare to a doctor's office will demand to photocopy your ID card to provide service, and you can be damn well sure that they aren't doing a good job protecting that information. They're storing it on their malware-ridden front desk Windows computer along with everyone else's.
As far as $100/mo vs $500/mo: what's the difference? It's all under $10k/year. Who cares?
In many places in the US it's de-facto illegal to live in a van, in some places it's explicitly illegal. Even if the van is parked on private property it'd still be illegal to be your primary residence due to zoning. There are exceptions for RVs and boats because they have sleeping, cooking and toilet facilities (which are required to be built a certain way).
In many places your driver license is used as authoritative identification for many other things, and the assumption is that those things require this additional verification. I don't know, but I think registering to vote might be one of these things in some places (it's been a while since I registered).
Side note: Why don't we have national ID in the US?
I know many people don't want us to risk becoming a "show your papers" country, but A) We already kinda are (ever been pulled over?), and B) It just makes more sense to have something like ID be centralized, preferably with a much better model then SSN's.
There's a long weird history of this; the bottom line is that interest groups on all political sides hate it:
1. The ACLU-style left fear it will lead to more pervasive, easier surveillance, and more "papers please" style checks on poor people and immigrants.
2. The right hates it because it's an extension of government power, arguably a 10th amendment violation, and it would greatly simplify voting for people who traditionally vote democrat.
3. A nontrivial number of people believe (no-joke) that it would be a portent of the apocalypse, relating to the number of the beast in the book of revelation. This actually came up in a number of state legislatures as they standardized drivers licenses after 9/11.
The few polls I've ever seen actually say it's fairly popular with people, but those interest groups are non trivial.
There are federal IDs in the US, of several varieties. But people are not required to have one.
People mainly rely on their state drivers licenses because states regulate driving. (And most other day-to-day government interactions that require ID)
If you’re the authority asking for ID, you get to decide which one to ask for.
If you live in a vehicle/RV it can be hard to prove residence. I've used UPS Store boxes but most places have caught on to that and don't allow it anymore. I've been told you can use a homeless shelter as the residence and a box as a mailing address but haven't tried it myself.
People in front of me in line got turned away for using printed bills, but mine worked just fine.