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The steelman, I guess, is that American elections are sufficiently Molochian that if the possibility (that you can stop someone from voting for your enemy party by making them fail an ID requirement) is put out there, someone will find a way to exploit it against people who constitutionally should be allowed to vote. The toolkit exists: you can charge money for valid forms of ID, or require a postal address, or make the process involve forms that are beyond the ability of the illiterate and low-executive-function to fill in and submit. If America wants to limit the franchise to those with $100 to spare, fixed housing, the literate and organised, then perhaps it may do so, but this seems like a change that should be performed explicitly through a constitutional amendment, rather than through the backdoor by people who will rub their hands and do the this-isn't-happening-and-it's-good-that-it-is denial dance.
You can moreover argue that even if we weigh disenfranchised Americans against wrongly enfranchised non-Americans who slip in under an ID-less voting procedure, the former should individually be given far greater weight as wrongs to avoid, by reasoning somewhat mirroring the "better n guilty men to go free than 1 innocent man to be punished" precept: one inappropriately counted vote only wrongs Americans by 1/(10s of millions) of an election outcome, but one American denied the franchise is one American wronged greatly by being excluded from the great civic ritual that tells them they are an equal member of their country (+1/(10s of millions) of an election outcome damage to everyone). This is a big deal under the Omelas-style non-additive ethics many subscribe to.
I also was under the impression (and very much [citation needed]) that historically, Anglo opposition to mandatory ID actually had a nontrivial undercurrent of Christian "this pattern-matches to the Mark of the Beast" thinking.
How do Americans even prevent people from voting several times in the same election?
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I yeschad to your first paragraph, but with regard to the last point - that may be a current among weird Kansas evangelicals, but the typical Anglo-civil-libertarian opposition to mandatory ID is more along the lines of "it's not a question of what the government pinky promises to do with it now, but what it can do with it in the future - plus, we can expect it to end up disenfranchising innocent people in a much worse way than something like slapping voter ID onto the existing system." This is very much a live political issue in the UK, where several governments have tried to introduce national ID and failed (voting in the UK also requires a government-issued photo ID, or a certificate from your local voting authority including a photo and the UK-equivalent of an SSN).
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