zlacker

Many State governments do not recognize a US passport as valid ID. This was unexpected when I first encountered an example of it, but apparently that is normal and I was just the last person to find out. The REAL ID legislation only regulates processing and format, there is no enforceable requirement to share that with the Federal government and many States (both red and blue) do not in practice. States recognize the ID of other States, as is required by the Constitution.

Because there is no official national ID system, you can do virtually everything Federally with a stack of affidavits and pretty thin "evidence" that you are who you claim to be. They strongly prefer that you have something resembling ID but it isn't strictly required. This also creates a national ID bootstrapping problem insofar as millions of Americans don't have proof that they are Americans because there was never a requirement of having documentary evidence. As a consequence, government processes are forgiving of people that have no "real" identification documents because so many people have fallen through the cracks historically.

Of course, this has been widely abused historically, so the US government has relatively sophisticated methods for "duck typing" identities by inference these days.

>>jandre+(OP)
> Many State governments do not recognize a US passport as valid ID.

Whoa, I did not know this. That's wild.