ID cards in the form suggested by the British government were unworkable. I know someone who was on the committee which was set up to discuss the matter, and will always remember his account of oneof its meetings: "The twelve experts one after another told the junior minister who was at the meeting why the idea was not physically or technically possible at that time in regard to that expert's field. She listened politely, and then told us, That isn't the answer we need. I want you to go and get us the answers we want."
How much does each card where you live cost the individual to whom it is issued, wombat1a? Less than £100? More? how much more? are they biometric? One of the better claims made about them here was that they would not cost more than £80 and that the scheme would pay for itself: a palpable lie, since the cost of implementing it was going to be more than £125 per head of population at that time, and that was just an estimate like the cost of the Olympics....
Are you able to check that the information on your card is all of it correct? If it is not correct, are you liable in law for it not being correct even though you had no way to verify it? That both of these things were going to be difficult and expensive for an individual to achieve, and that the individual would be in breach of the law if the data were not correct in all particulars, were just two of the major flaws in the system proposed under the legislation of 2006 (repealed in 2010 and never enforced) -- I knew one or two of the people who would have been entering individuals' data into the database had it gone ahead, and frankly I would not have trusted them to send all their Christmas cards to the right person at the right address: it was well above their pay-grade. OI was told that their work was not going to be put through any sort of verification process, too. Oh, and their pay really was low: how much d'you think a crook would have needed to bung one of them in order to get a valid ID card made out to a fictional person? My guess is twenty-five quid would have been ample.
You do know about the way that people in some US states have been deprived of their vote because their data is entered as J Smith in one place and John Smith in another, or even as J. Smith, don't you?