gian

The check in the US is done when you register to vote. Once you are registered, a variety of proofs of ID can be used to vote at your polling location.

And why the double check ? It would not be better to just go to the polling station, show your id and then vote ?
(I undestand that it is a simplification, in the US people move way more often that here and this add some other problems)

Requiring a passport and birth cert or some other strong ID are unnecessary at the actual voting site. The main reason for doing this is to make voting take longer,

Considering that if I have no one before me to vote, it take about 30 seconds from the moment I enter the polling station and the moment I am handed the cards to cast the vote I would argue that saying that this way it will take longer is not really true.
And, btw, we do the check of the document against a printed list who containt all the names of the people who can vote at a polling station, splitted between man and women.

and be more strenuous, which means that you can have a greater effect on election results by manipulating the number of polling stations for an area.

Every difficulty you build to try to make harder for your enemy voters to cast their vote is a difficulty you set up also for your voters.
And simply manipulating the number of polling station in a certain area give you nothing: people who want to vote against you will come anyway and you cannot know if they will come before your voters of after and which voters eventually will lose their patience and just go home without casting a vote

The Trump administration is building a computer system so that States can ‘verify’ a person’s citizenship prior to allowing them to vote.

As an Italian (but think most of EU citizens) who need to show my id card to vote, I don’t really see where is the problem if there is a check if the person could vote or not. I can agree that using the SSN maybe is not the right way but why should people who are not citizes allowed to vote ? For context, in Italy if I have my legal address (residenza) in Milan I cannot vote for the mayor of Rome, and btw, why should I ?

It is not this case, I agree, but to be honest it would not be the first time that some company create an artificial scarcity to keep the prices up.