It’s getting close enough to election time, and various voter registration deadlines, that this excerpt from RISKS that I posted elsewhere is due for a refresh. Will you be able to vote this year? Take a few minutes soon and make sure that you are registered AND have whatever ID or papers your polling place will require.
Addressing the Challenges of Identification and Authentication in American Society
by Peter Swire, Cassandra Q. Butts, Center for American Progress, 2 Jun 2008
How individuals identify themselves in our country grows more complex by the year. Just last month, 12 nuns were turned away from voting booths during the Indiana presidential primary because they lacked state identification
(none of them drives), a stark reminder that the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld Indiana’s voter ID law poses lasting consequences to our democracy. And two years ago last month the personal identification data of 26.5 million veterans were lost from a government laptop, the latest in a
series of data breaches that threaten the integrity of everyone’s
identification.
Those 12 nuns are among 20 million other voting age citizens without driver’s licenses, and they join those 26.5 million veterans and many millions of other Americans who suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of what we call the ID Divide-Americans who lack official identification, suffer from identity theft, are improperly placed on watch lists, or
otherwise face burdens when asked for identification. The problems of these uncredentialed people are largely invisible to credentialed Americans, many of whom have a wallet full of proofs of identity. Yet those on the wrong side of the ID Divide are finding themselves squeezed out of many parts of
daily life, including finding a job, opening a bank account, flying on an airplane, and even exercising the right to vote. …
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/06/id_divide.html
Full report (pdf)
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/06/pdf/id_divide.pdf
Identification and Authentication Resources page
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/06/id_resources.html
(Via RISKS-Digest, RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Sunday 8 June 2008 Volume 25 : Issue 19
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/25.19.html>
The current issue can be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>)
Relentless Inquiry 
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