SOME Democrat PLEASE put forth a LEGIT Voter ID bill.

[Ms. Toad]

37. Birth certificates and social security numbers do not always exist.

It was much more common in the past to be born at home. That meant registering the birth wasn't automatic, like it is now for someone born in a hospital. Some were not registered at all. In the South, some midwives serving black communities were actively discouraged from registering births. So there are elderly people who do not have birth certificates. It is possible to create a delayed birth registration, but to do so you have to have affidavits from people who witnessed your birth (inherently many years older, and by now many of them are dead) or secondary documents (like baptismal records). In the 50s and 60s, many black churches were the targets of fire bombing - so some of those secondary records no longer exist.

As for Social Security numbers - those weren't always issued at birth, the way they are now. I got mine around 13 - AND I wasn't required to provide documentary proof of citizenship to get it (I never had a copy of my birth certificate until I was an adult - all we had prior to that was the ceremonial copy from the hospital). So my social security number doesn't actually prove citizenship. And many women didn't work, so they never received a social security number. Until 1989, a social security number was not required to receive benefits based on your spouses or parents income. As of the last number I can find, there were about 11,000 such individuals.

And existing in the system isn't the same as being able to provide a documentary chain proving citizenship. Most people my age or older got driver's licenses on the basis of their parents word that I was who I said I was, and was born on the date I said I was born on, and in the location I said I was born in. (I'm not sure when that changed - but I know it didn't change right after I got my license.) Once I had a driver's license I was in the system, and each new drivers license just piggy-backed of of the one before - again, not based on my birth certificate or any official document, but on my parents word.

Just because the systems have changed over time, and you can't now imagine not having a birth certificate or a social security number doesn't mean that was always the way things worked.

Systematic documentation (and the requirement to have a social security number for more than working - and to prove right to work when you started a new job) is relatively recent. The changes began in the 80s. Many people born before that are still alive and voting. The likelihood they can't prove citizenship with documents increase with age, being female, growing up in a rural area, and being minority.

Democrats should not support anything which disenfranchises those citizen voters.