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Opinion: Most people are terrible at matching faces to photos, making polling checks unreliable:
On Thursday May 4, for the first time, members of the public voting in local council elections in England were required to bring photo ID to their polling station. Initial reports suggested that a few people were turned away because they didn't bring one of the approved forms of photo ID.
But even if they did bring the right documents, such as a driving license or passport, there's a question mark over whether the people manning polling stations could tell accurately whether the voter was the person pictured in the ID.
When you present your photo ID to be checked, the person looking at it has to decide if your face matches the picture in the document. In a lab, this is usually done with images and is called "face matching". Such studies typically present two face images side-by-side and ask people to judge whether the images show the same person or two different people.
While people perform well at this task when they are familiar with the person pictured, studies report the error rate can be as high as 35% when those pictured are unfamiliar. Even when people are asked to compare a live person standing in front of them with a photo, a recent study found they still got more than 20% of their answers wrong.
The people checking our photo ID are almost always unfamiliar with us, so we should expect that this is a difficult, error-prone task for them. And while you might think that people whose job it is to check photo ID would be better at it than the rest of us, cashiers, police officers and border control officers have all been shown to be as poor at face matching as untrained people.
The study of border control officers also showed they don't improve at the task as time goes on—there was no relationship between their performance and the number of years they had spent in the job.
This suggests that face recognition ability doesn't change with practice. While repeated exposure to variable images of one person's face can help you to recognize them, professional facial image comparison courses aimed at training face identification ability have not been shown to produce lasting improvements in performance.
There is, however, an argument for the role of natural ability in face recognition. People known as "super-recognizers" perform far better than the general population at tests of face recognition, and have been used by police forces to identify criminals.
For example, super-recognizers could be asked to look through images of wanted persons and then try to find them in CCTV footage, or match images caught on CCTV to police mugshots. Some of us are just better than others at these types of task.
But why is it so difficult for most of us to recognize an unfamiliar person across different images? We all know that we look different in different pictures—not many of us would choose to use our passport image on a dating website. And this variability in appearance is what makes unfamiliar face matching so difficult.
When we are familiar with someone, we have seen their face many times looking lots of different ways. We have been exposed to a high amount of this "within-person variability", enabling us to put together a stable representation of that familiar person in our minds.
In fact, exposure to within-person variability has been shown to be crucial for learning what a new face looks like. With unfamiliar people, we just haven't seen enough of their variability to reliably decide whether they look like the image in their photo ID.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday May 14, @05:23PM (3 children)
(I'm asking and not trying to be belligerent. Please be gentle.)
Why would younger or poorer people be less likely to have ID documents? Where I live (acknowledging geographical, income bracket, and life experience bias) ID is required for many social service programs. Not having ID would cut me off from opportunities with higher personal impact than voting. If someone under 30 claims they don't have my first assumption is they've recently been robbed, have warrants, or have mental health issues.
The group I know of without ID is grandmas and great grandmas, older women that don't have ID because their husbands "always took care of that". If they don't have ID, it's hard and expensive to put together a 60-year-old paper trail with no seed documents. This was a blind spot for me I didn't discover until I heard my mother refer to herself as "Ms. George Hire" when dealing with utilities and bank accounts. My dad had been dead for more than a decade, and everything was still all done in his name. In her peer group (widowers) this is surprisingly common. She had ID, but a subset of this demographic doesn't.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Sunday May 14, @05:42PM
For brevity, I didn't give the whole story.
When the Conservative politicians devised they law, they apparently deliberately limited the kinds of ID documents that would be acceptable in strange ways such that older people had more options in terms of what would be accepted as valid ID. There were several forms of identification acceptable if you were a pensioner, for example, but the equivalent for younger people (travel cards) were not. The Electoral Commission [electoralcommission.org.uk] has the definitive list for all parts of the UK.
Poorer people tend not to have things like passports and driving licences, for obvious reasons. In recent years, young people have been putting off learning to drive until much later, due to the cost involved. Life has become much more expensive for them with rising rents and university fees and so on.
In the UK we do not have a national ID card, unlike some other countries. This is for reasons of personal liberty. We do get issued with a National Insurance (social security) number, and we get issued with a card, but it does not have a photograph, only a signature.
The law was rushed through, but very little effort was made by the government to publicise it properly and to tell people how to get the right ID.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 15, @12:35PM
Crime type stuff and priorities, in summary. In more detail:
Get into a car accident without insurance, its unclear who was there, who did it, etc.
Then there's financial-ish stuff like illegal use of food stamps/EBT cards.
If the cops randomly search someone its kind of a smoking gun to have wildly mismatched documents, but no documents at all is pretty safe.
Another common problem is motivational priority type stuff. "You need that to vote and its free and takes a half hour at the courthouse and DMV to obtain a free ID card" is too much for some people who just want to goof off and as a benefit they get to blame whitey. "You'll need those documents to fill out paperwork when you get a job" well they don't do that either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @03:40PM
It's because replacing lost stolen ID involves more than simply going to a government office. It requires negotiating time off of work, and some groups have less, as in little to no, leverage in negotiating that - "No, get back to work or I'll find someone who will" is much more common among supermarket cashiers than the P.Eng. crowd, for example. It also requires getting there. I can't remember if it was AL or GA, a few years back, closed 75% of their DMV offices and the pattern that they chose disproportionately affected black people. For example. Note the 'less' previously. It's not necessary for a pattern to be absolute for a policy to be discriminatory.
So, in answer to your question, younger and poorer people (two "for example" axes) are less able to negotiate time offf work and to arrange reliable transportation for a four to six hour block of time to the office and back.