In the US, ID card policies were and still are often used to disenfranchise minorities from voting. The policies behind them are often inconsistently applied an

In the US, ID card policies were and still are often used to disenfranchise minorities from voting. The policies behind them are often inconsistently applied and sometimes require large bureaucratic efforts to rectify. Obtaining a copy of your birth certificate in the US often means going back to your home county and visiting some municipal office for hours on end. If you work a 9-5, there's no way in hell that's happening. Voter suppression in the United States has had a long, sordid history. Blacks were given the right to vote after the civil war, prompting southern states to implement literacy tests, poll taxes, basically any legitimate-seeming test to de-facto turn away black people at the polls. This got so bad that we literally wrote an Amendment (24th) to state "yeah you can't do this either". What's fucked up is that this sort of thing STILL happens. This past Tuesday, a number of voters in Virginia received calls telling them to go to a different polling station from the one they were assigned. See https://theintercept.com/2017/11/07/virginia-voters-get-mysterious-robocalls-telling-them-their-polling-place-has-changed/ https://theintercept.com/2017/11/07/virginia-voters-get-myst... Stuff You Should Know did a really good episode on voter suppression in the US that I'd recommend.