Mastodawn

@alice @amydiehl That also means the end to witness protection schemes.

How do you deal with an asylum seeker without papers? There is no birth certificate or passport to be found particularly in countries where civil society and the system of keeping of public records has broken down.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl People with new identities courtesy of witness protection get birth certificates for their new names.

Very few countries allow asylum-seekers to vote in national elections at all, regardless of how well-documented they are. If one becomes a US citizen, they get a certificate of naturalization, which is explicitly listed as acceptable proof of citizenship in the bill.

This proposed law is awful, but those two specific concerns aren’t affected either way.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl I have had a collection of experiences, related to the different way that the UK and most other European countries treat identity.

Some countries base your permission to stay on your birth certificate and others on the passport you present.

In my case the names on the two are not the same.

The UK demands that if you have two passports then the names on both must be identical.

But UK passports do not support accented characters found in other European alphabets.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Yeah, the EU+UK situation is separately awful, since there’s no super-state authority you can directly be a citizen of (i.e, you can’t be a citizen of the EU directly, only of a state within it). Instead, there’s a mess of individual states all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. Most allow non-resident citizens to vote. Some allow non-citizen residents to vote. Ridiculous, inconsistent documentation standards like the passport situation you mentioned. All based on imaginary lines on the ground.

Eggs now in different baskets.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl Before Brexit happened if there had been an "EU passport" I would have applied for it immediately.

Identity is a pain in the neck. In the UK you can choose the name that appears on your passport.

In the Netherlands and Norway people are all registered in the People Registers. So you get the name that you are officially registered with when you apply for a passport.

The UK has a perculiar way of dealing with legal identity and has no central register for all people.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl I have no idea how this is managed in the US though.

Is your legal identity registered at federal or state level?

Or not at all?

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Births are registered at the local level (county/parrish, below US state), but they confer citizenship at the federal level. The US federal government is the entity which issues passports and social security numbers (basically our national ID number for financial purposes). Driver licenses and most other non-passport IDs are managed by the US states. Depending on who is asking for identity and why, we may need a birth/naturalization certificate, passport, social security number, driver license/state ID number, or a paper utility bill (sometimes needed to prove residency for state and local elections).

US states run their own elections, so rules for voting are all over the place (which is why the USA doesn’t meet the minimum standards for election monitoring by the Carter Center).

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl "SAVE Act would require birth cert or passport that matches voters legal name. "

So where and how is a person's "legal name" recorded?

In the UK there is the concept of "known as" which means that you can end up being called something other than is on your passport.

You can change the name on your passport without changing your legal name by deed poll to match it.

Not advisable as I found out trying to help a relative but I believe even now it is still possible.

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl So is the "legal name" in this case the name that the person has used to register themselves as voter?

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl “Legal name” in this case is talking about the voter registration. We register to vote at the US state level. The registration involves name and address (to determine which county, city, town, etc. elections we vote in). We get a registration card (mine arrived two days ago) which lists all of the information about which districts we vote in, and we’re added to the voter rolls available to polling places.

Since US states run their own elections, they all have different rules about how to determine who someone is so they can use their ballot. Many have been adding photo ID requirements, and the name on the photo ID has to match the name on the voter roll. This proposed law is saying beyond just a photo ID, you also have to prove you’re a citizen using documentation with a name which matches the photo ID and the voter registration.

A passport is both a photo ID and proof of citizenship, so it fills both requirements. Everybody else would need to bring a birth/naturalization certificate. When people change their names, they often don’t go down to the county registrar’s office to get a new copy of their birth certificate. They usually just keep the original one and a copy of the name change documentation, as that’s enough for everything else we use a birth certificate for.

It’s ultimately a poll tax, just like the photo ID requirement. Blatantly unconstitutional, but we have an illegitimate Supreme Court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax_(Great_Britain)

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl We had a poll tax in the UK at the end of 1980s/early 1990s. Implicit in the law was that it would force people to remove themselves from the electoral roll in order to avoid paying the tax.

The only good that came out of it was that the opposition to the tax forced the resignation of Prime Minister Thatcher - an odious pro-Pinochet, neo-liberal, monetarist, Reaganite.

So maybe this tale gives some hope for you folks in the US.

Poll tax (Great Britain) - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

@bob_zim @alice @amydiehl More recently another UK scandal related to legal identity and nationality in the form of the "Windrush scandal".

Windrush scandal - Wikipedia

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl A lot of the US is heavily racist. After slavery was limited to prisoners, states used a variety of techniques to prevent Black people from voting. Poll taxes and poll tests (literacy tests, civics tests with biased answers) were favorites. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 explicitly made poll taxes illegal for federal elections. The Supreme Court of the United States also declared poll taxes unconstitutional in 1966.

Incidentally, the literacy tests are where the terms “grandfather clause” and “grandfathered in” come from. Many states allowed a man to skip the literacy test and vote if his father or grandfather had voted before 1867, a date selected to exclude most Black men.