> states rights people are against national IDs because it's over-reach

States also generate massive revenues from ID programs. That produces a motivated lobbying force. And in politics, a motivated minority can usually outmaneuver an unmotivated majority.

I don't see what would change under a national ID. Here in Canada the provincial government is still the controller and printer for your national passport; and everything below passports (e.g. birth certificates, driver's licenses, etc.) is handled entirely at the province level, where it can be delegated to private/crown corporations (e.g. here in BC, ICBC—a province-majority-owned insurance company—handles issuing both driver's licenses and "BCID" cards.)

These provincial documents have unique identifiers on them, but those identifiers are only required to be provincially unique, not nationally unique. But that number is still registered in a national database; they just have use a compound key consisting of the province-of-record plus the number as the primary key.

In other words, it works exactly like state license-plate registration works in the US. The state makes/issues the plates, with identifiers from its own numerical namespace; and then there's a national registry with the key (state, plate number). Nothing breaks. Works just fine.

>I don't see what would change under a national ID. Here in Canada the provincial government is still the controller and printer for your national passport; and everything below passports (e.g. birth certificates, driver's licenses, etc.) is handled entirely at the province level, where it can be delegated to private/crown corporations (e.g. here in BC, ICBC—a province-majority-owned insurance company—handles issuing both driver's licenses and "BCID" cards.)

The federal government cannot require a citizen to have a national id and cannot force states to require their residents to have one. I am not even sure if the federal government can force the states to issue birth certificates (all states do so its not an issue).

>In other words, it works exactly like state license-plate registration works in the US. The state makes/issues the plates, with identifiers from its own numerical namespace; and then there's a national registry with the key (state, plate number). Nothing breaks. Works just fine.

Pretty sure in the US there is no national registry of license plates. Each state gives access to their own database to the other states and the fed (for law enforcement purposes). There also isn't a namespace for each state. Each state could have the exact same plate numbers. The name of the state is on the plate but is not part of the actual number.

I meant my statement "I don't see what would change..." in the context of the GP post: I don't see what would change about the current business model where states make money by issuing their own IDs.

As in, I don't see how making the state ID documents into "valid US-federal identification documents" (in some cooperating shared-distributed registry) would make it any harder for the states to make money issuing IDs.

I don't think your reply really addresses that. Sure, some people wouldn't have IDs. There are always some people without government-issued identifiers. So what?

> Each state gives access to their own database to the other states and the fed (for law enforcement purposes).

Functionally equivalent, insofar as a state government opting out of this sharing program would screw everything up and get that state government in trouble with both national agencies, and with all the other state agencies that rely on the system.

Of course, there are practical differences at implementation time, e.g. that the individual states don't have to adhere to any standard, but instead everyone has to just program against 50 individually-designed APIs.

But politically, this system of registries is essentially nationalized. In the same sense that politically, the US only has one central bank; just one that has branches that each call themselves a "central bank." But they all, necessarily, coordinate; and defecting from said coordination would break the entire system. It's one of those "monolith masquerading as microservices" distributed systems, so tightly coupled that it may as well not be distributed at all.

> There also isn't a namespace for each state. Each state could have the exact same plate numbers.

I think you're misunderstanding; this property (that states can have the same plate numbers) is precisely what it means for states to have "separate namespaces." A namespace is something that prevents identifier collisions within itself. If you have one shared namespace, there are no collisions. If each state has its own namespace, then keys (license plate numbers) can collide between states, because each namespace only validates uniqueness within itself.

You might be thinking of a "namespace prefix", which is not the same thing as a namespace.

But there is a standard synthetic compound key, one that is nationally unique; and that key is the state of issuance plus the license plate number. This isn't printed on the license plate itself (i.e. the state of issuance is not a "namespace prefix"); it's something you figure out by recognizing the design of the license plate. That's why, when you hear e.g. a police BOLO, it's phrased as "[state] plates, number [XYZ123]." That phrase is the common English-language encoding of the nationally-unique license-plate identifier.

Not in my province (PEI) we have to go to another (NS) to get a passport, our mail is sorted there (Halifax), and our driver's licenses are now made in Ontario.

That doesn't imply that this was done via federal mandate, though, no? I assume the PEI government—whose duties those nominally are—just asked the other provinces to lend it a hand using their existing infrastructure. A peerwise-negotiated arrangement, rather than a result of central planning.

I know many Republicans (the “states rights” people) who have no problem with a National ID. Granted, some of them have their beliefs based on an unfounded belief of “illegals can vote and the Democrats want that.”