New York is about to find out what it feels like to shop with a permission slip.
As Mayor Zohran Mamdani rolls out his city-run grocery stores, his team has quietly added a wrinkle: you’ll need ID to buy anything. Not to walk in and browse — just to actually check out. Officials say it’s about keeping the program honest, aimed at real New Yorkers rather than resellers looking to work an angle.
“So our RFP makes it very clear that this is a program for New Yorkers to be able to put food on the table, not a program for people to be able to make a quick buck through reselling,” Mamdani said, when asked how the stores would be safeguarded.
Jeanny Pak, interim head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, filled in the details. The city plans to issue its own card — something, she said, in the spirit of a library card — to keep track of who’s shopping and make sure the benefit stays where it’s meant to: with everyday New Yorkers.
No card, no purchase. Simple as that.
It’s a sensible-sounding safeguard. It’s also, as more than a few people have now noticed, an identification requirement — proposed by an administration, and a movement, that has spent years insisting such requirements are a threat to democracy itself.
Mamdani’s own chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has called voter ID laws a “campaign to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Democrats nationally have argued for years that asking someone to show ID before voting is a form of suppression, particularly hard on women who’ve changed their names through marriage.
Apparently the same instinct doesn’t apply to buying groceries.
President Trump, never one to let a straight line go unswung at, took his swing Monday. Told by a reporter that Mamdani’s grocery stores would require ID, he didn’t miss a beat.
“I wish they’d have an ID to access the voting booth!” Trump said. “You know, they don’t want to access the voting booth with any identification. We want voter ID, and we want proof of citizenship!”
It’s a fair point, dressed up as a punchline.
If an ID card is a reasonable way to make sure a grocery subsidy goes to the right people, it’s hard to explain why the same logic collapses at the ballot box. Somebody in the Mamdani administration figured out that ID has its uses. The rest of the party might want to ask why.
