Comment by cpitman
4 years ago
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.
It's also designed to make sure that poorer people who don't have stable, permanent housing have a tough time
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.
Poor people are excluded via apathy not malice
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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.
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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.
The poor man pays twice.
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.
and more directly, to keep them from voting.
The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives.
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.
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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?
Just curious.
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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.
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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.
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That's false. Many other countries have implemented simpler, more accurate, and less discriminatory systems.
> 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.
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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...
They could pay Google and Apple to tell them where you sleep, based on your phone GPS anyway.
>there also isn’t any better alternatives.
Of course there is. It's having a central resident registry like is common in most countries other than the US.
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As a counterpoint, I had no problem using a printed cell phone bill as evidence of residency at a California DMV.
You could give the cellphone company any damn address you want is the point. It proves nothing.
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 and my son both got RealIDs in California this year with printed bills after submitting the PDF versions online without any problem.
> 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).
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-pa...
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'm quite sure he knew what would happen if he didn't accept it. I would rejoin the queue and use another counter.
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.
"That's a note, right? You should fold it."[1]
[1]https://youtu.be/ppunAo8ckBc?t=174
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.
Fuck that.
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?
I would bet entire dollars it was some local person's interpretation of the requirements, rather than anything intentional at the legislative level.
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!
Love this.
Also why does the DMV need a proof of residence? What if you live in a van?
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?
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The DMV typically needs a proof of residency because you're only allowed to have one state license - the one for the state of which you're a resident.
What’s inherently wrong with being licensed in multiple states?
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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.
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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.
What about other lesser-known private mail boxes?
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In the states I've lived in, licenses and ids required proof of residency. If you can't prove you live in the state, you're not getting one.
That’s brilliant. Like a wholesome version of “mail fraud” ;)
Clever. Also remember to remove the printer headers and footers.
Is this recent? Which state? I just got my RealID in California in December, and tri-fold-free printed PDFs worked fine for me.
Interesting