4 ms·
This really shouldn't be a problem in the modern age when each person can be assigned a globally (or at least nationally) unique ID number as soon as their birt
by kijin 7y ago
This really shouldn't be a problem in the modern age when each person can be assigned a globally (or at least nationally) unique ID number as soon as their birth certificate is produced. It baffles me that the most technologically advanced country in the world still has difficulties figuring out who has the right to vote.
- ghaff 7y agoA lot of people in the US just don't like the idea of a central national database that stores information about them. To be sure, this (increasingly) happens at some level anyway. And to a lot of people in, say, Europe this probably seems like a baffling concern. But it's the way it is.
- kijin 7y agoThere doesn't even need to be a central database of every citizen. Distributed generation of unique identifiers is a more or less solved problem.
- kgwgk 7y agoHow does the distributed generation of unique identifiers help to keep track of who has voting rights?
- kijin 7y agoState and/or municipal authorities could be tasked with generating identifiers and signing them cryptographically, so that any voting station can verify whether a given identifier is genuine. The federal government doesn't need to keep a central registry of all identifiers, only a list of public keys used by states and municipalities. Obviously I'm not aware of any country doing things in such a convoluted way. But if Americans really don't want there to be a central registry of everyone's identity, modern computer science and cryptography could help.
- cdash 7y agoYou expect that over a hundred years we will manage to keep all private keys used secret?
- bonoboTP 7y agoYeah, but corporate databases documenting every small detail of their life like who they meet, their location history, chat history with friends and family, etc, all that is fine. Because it's not the government... Never mind that the govt has access through prism and other channels... It really baffles me how voter ID is such a huge issue, but most Americans voluntarily offer up so much of their private info to online social netwoks.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoAmericans, correct me if I'm wrong but I've researched that left leaning people don't like the idea because minorities can't get documents easily because of distance or money, right leaning don't like federal government have the list and are a bit paranoid about it. Both reasons sound very weird to me.