A clean paper trail is only possible if everyone always enters your name in exactly how you spell it. That's not realistic though.
If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it.
Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong.
And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages.
Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character.
This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.
If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it.
Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong.
And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages.
Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character.
This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.