I would NOT object to taxpayer subsidies for voting ID cards, any more than I object to taxpayers funding the costs of running polling stations at an election. If this ain't a legitimate function of government, I don't know what is.

It would save some money if the subsidies only went to those who needed them, like food stamps.

It is extremely easy to register to vote. It's free, it just involves filling out a card and mailing it, and there are damn few places in America where you can't get to a mailbox. Okay, I think you may have to buy a stamp, but geez. California does ask for an ID number to register.

To get a library card here once just required showing up with a utility bill with your name on it and some kind of ID.

I think -- this pains me -- a national ID card is the easiest, most secure and most consistent answer. It reminds me enough of the internal passport to make me squirm, and we would have to give up some anonymity, but we've lost that much privacy anyway if we look at the world we live in honestly. I don't know if I would go as far as including fingerprints or retinal scans on them, though. Just because that gives me the creeps.

It goes without saying that I don't like the idea of a national ID card, but as you say, a few minutes' rational thought and I realize that this horse probably left the barn a long time ago. When I think of the number of places that have my Social Security Number, and of the data on me already on file in many places, I'm beginning to think a national ID would be about as big an additional impact on my privacy as spitting into the ocean.

I'm not sure how you could even try to make them counterfeit-proof without some kind of bio signature on them, either a fingerprint or a retinal scan. The fingerprint would probably be cheapest--readers seem to be quite cheap. For $200 you can get a fingerprint reader that pops out of a slot in your notebook computer for computer security. I did not know this before I saw it in a catalog last week, and it was quite a surprise.

If this kind of tech is this cheap, it could easily be incorporated into most checkout stations at stores and banks, and if your fingerprint pattern is encoded on your ID, you could be easily matched with your ID card. The bitch, of course, would be encoding the pattern on the card in such a way that it could not be done by counterfeiters. I have no idea how this would be done--not my area of expertise. If a counterfeiter can forge your fingerprint pattern into a fake ID card, then the whole gimmick becomes useless. Same for retinal patterns. The data strip on the card is the weak link in the chain.