Comment by teh_infallible
1 hour ago
You need an ID to drive, buy alcohol, buy cigarettes, board a plane. And people manage to do all those things.
1 hour ago
You need an ID to drive, buy alcohol, buy cigarettes, board a plane. And people manage to do all those things.
You can do all that with a driving license, but a driving license is not a proof of citizenship and thus of your eligibility to vote.
In Europe, you can't get a regular ID without being a citizen. So having an ID automatically means you're eligible to vote.
Yes, but a driver's license can be accepted as ID.
Just because a driver's license isn't proof of citizenship doesn't mean that it isn't sufficient, since it will have some identifier connected to the identity of the voter. You would show the driver's license, then the registrars would find your name on the list, strike it out, give your voting envelopes, and then you go wait for a private booth to become free and then you go into that booth and put your votes in those voting envelopes.
A Swedish driver's license doesn't mean Swedish citizenship. It can still be used to check somebody's identity. Citizenship is checked by seeing whether the person is on the voter rolls, not by their identity card.
This is not true. For example not every citizen can vote (people under guardianship or criminals) and not citizens can vote in local elections in the EU, if they came from another EU country.
Yes. There are all kinds of edge cases.
The point I tried to make is that with the system we have here it's much less of a hassle to prove you're eligible to vote. The system wants you to be able to vote, and to be able to do that easily.
> In Europe, you can't get a regular ID without being a citizen. So having an ID automatically means you're eligible to vote.
Nitpick: E.g. Norwegian ID cards can be had by any legal resident. The card will say that you're not a citizen though, so your point about that stands.
Re driving license: Driving license is a valid form of ID for voting here. All eligible people are on the voting rolls automatically (unlike the absurd american system), and the driving license is merely used to prove you are who you say you are.
Actually you need a REAL ID to board a plane now. 20% of americans don't have them. They're pointless, take a lot of time and effort to aquire and are needlessly expensive.
I don't have one because I have a passport.
In much of Europe you don't need ID for those, except a driving license, which happens to be an ID but primarily exists to prove you are qualified to drive. If you look young you are asked to prove your age if buying cigarettes or alcohol but the requirements for that are relatively low.
Until recently in the UK you did not need any ID to vote, that was introduced recently as an echo to the US stolen election conspiracy, as demagogues love to steal ideas from each other.
No, all people do not manage to do those things (even if they wanted to).