US citizens can legally exist without any government identification or documentation whatsoever - no SSN, no birth certificate, no driver's license, no state ID

US citizens can legally exist without any government identification or documentation whatsoever - no SSN, no birth certificate, no driver's license, no state ID, no nothing. It deals with them the way the government dealt with such cases before government identification ever existed - who do you say you are, and who do other people say you are? Where do you and other people say you live? In your example, in the modern age, "John Smith" would have an arrest mugshot to aid with identification. Whatever criminal records are kept would probably just have the missing information blank. It's not as if there's a big database of citizens with Felon? Y/N as one of the fields, making you run the risk of marking the wrong John Smith as a felon. The world is a very messy place - the US system does an okay job of treating it as one.