The curious thing here....is every nation in Europe.....requires you by 18 to have a national ID, which you have to show to vote. Almost all of the Middle East countries....require you to have a national ID by age 18, and you need it to vote.
There are only ten nations without a true and mandated national ID: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Philippines, Norway, the UK, Ireland, Denmark, India, and the US.
So you can imagine the US crew standing there....and almost everyone listening at the meeting...requires an ID by age eighteen...to do anything, from voting to buying booze. The chief country that might have supported your statement? The US. You could have stated this statement back in Detroit or Miami, but instead spent $15k on a couple of guys traveling first-class to Geneva and staying at a fine hotel for a couple of nights.
Other than getting the cooperation of maybe Tonga and the Christmas Islands...there wasn’t much to be gained.
Similar thing happened between the European and American anti-war protests during the Bush years where the American protesters were railing against the US Patriot Act, listing all of the intrusive and sinister new government powers that the act bestowed... and the European protesters were puzzled by the American outrage since their governments have long been able to pretty much do every sinister thing on the list, and plenty more.
In Germany for instance, if the police get a search warrant for your premises, it just says 'SEARCH WARRANT' with little else. They can just start opening up your mail out in your mailbox if they want. No judge is going to dismiss the case because the address was incorrect; the cops knew who they were focusing on, and that's good enough for the court. When you go to court, the judge learns for the first time that the police had been tapping your telephone all along to prove evidence of your crimes. In France, if they think you're a terrorist, they just swoop you up and you sit in jail until they decide what they're charging you with. THEN you see your lawyer. They've been doing that to pesky Algerian activists since George Bush was a baby, if not longer. In the Latin Euro nations, the cops can just basically whoop your ass until you confess.
Once the American organizers of the anti-war protests realized this discrepancy, they stopped making references to showing opposition to the US Patriot Act. I have archives of the old anti-war protest posters which prove this out, having been living in San Francisco at the time.
That list boils down to some British Commonwealth and former Commonwealth countries plus three. I’m sure the UN will understand the Democrat’s handwringing. /s
While it is true we don’t have a National ID card here in the UK, and have no obligation to show any ID in order to vote, we have to show our polling card, which is delivered to the house by the postal service three weeks prior to the election. A yellow card for local elections, a white card for national ones.
We can vote in one named polling station - named on the polling card - and that polling station only, and our card gets stamped when we receive our voting form to prevent a return visit.
All requests for an absentee/postal ballot have to be received by the local council 6 weeks before the election, so you do not get your polling card. Miss the deadline and you either show up or lose your vote.
It ain’t exactly photo ID, but in a designated polling station, with people who know you - the polling stations are based on neighborhood - it is a pretty good system for a people that flat out reject the idea of a National ID card.
Some of us count national id as Social Security cards. I have had one for decades.