Right. The state/feds have decreed that my declaration that I live at 123 Maple Street, NiceCity, NT is not acceptable because I could be a terrorist, so I must PROVE, I tells ya, prove that I live at that address.
So, assume I am a terrorist and go to get that proof. I go to one of my bank accounts and change the address online to the above address. I print out my statement. That is proof.
But the feds are sneakier than that. They require TWO proofs! So I call up my auto insurance and tell them that I moved to the above address and to please email me the new card so I am in compliance with the law. I get an email three minutes later. Since I pay all bills online and have declined paper copies, no mail is sent. I have my second proof.
Or, if I don’t like that, I register to vote and put in the above address (no ID required for that) and have the mail forwarded to my real address.
You can look at the list of documents required to “prove” identity and all of them suffer from the same flaws.
Or, if I was a minimally below average terrorist, I could forge those documents with a cut and paste feature.
But at least the feds, for really no reason, have verified my residence, which as noted above, doesn’t mean shit for security purposes which is why they have delayed the requirement for 15 years and will do so until the last state passes this absurd law.
All I want to do is drive. I should be able to swap out my old state ID for the new one. My picture is on it. That’s me. Let’s get on with it.
When I went to get my driver’s license renewed (expiring soon and I had moved) I was told that they would NOT accept computer print-outs of bills - they had to have a paper bill mailed to your address with a valid postmark.
I suspect different states are requiring/enforcing document rules differently in this matter.
Again - mileage seems to vary from state to state. I was also told that for my state a valid SS card was required to get RealID -OR- you could use something like a W2 from work… IF that W2 was mailed to you as a physical document, NOT printed off your computer. The “no computer print-out” was communicated at the BMV, not in th on-line information.
My company, like many, has been pushing people towards direct deposit an on-line W2’s for years. If they’ve already issued a W2 to you for that year they will not mail you another. You can switch to “paper copy, please, and mail it” for next year, but that doesn’t help you if you need to renew a license before then.
I actually still had my marriage certificate, but the state of Indiana would not accept it, saying it did not comply with modern document standards (?!?). I had to go back to Illinois to get a “modern” copy.
At that, I was better off than the elderly couple sitting next to me - the BMV bitch flat out told them that if they didn’t have a marriage certificate in hand they weren’t really married and the woman had been fraudulently using the “wrong” name all these years, then couldn’t understand why the little old lady burst out into tears at that.
Part of the problem is that the nation had gotten along with identifying people quite well without such elaborate verification and now all of sudden people are having to dig up documents from decades ago, half a century ago, even longer for the elderly… this is not such a problem for the young, whose lives are documented more thoroughly than ever, but for older folks who haven’t had this need reconstructing all this can be a pain. Even more so if they’ve moved around a lot in their lives, necessitating a birth certificate from this state, marriage from that, other documentation from yet another…
In my state, people getting their first license do NOT have the option to forego RealID.
In my state, people moving in from out of state do NOT have the option to forego RealID.
They’re really pushing this thing - when I went to get my license renewed I was not told that I could opt out, I was told I HAD TO DO THIS. Which is, yes, against the rules but they’re giving that out at the BMV, which they shouldn’t be doing.
I kept mine - but as I said, the state of Indiana wouldn’t accept it. I had to get another copy, conforming to “modern” standards. I am told this is happening to pretty much anyone married more than 20-25 years, especially if they were married outside the state.
There are not options for people living in Indiana.
You can, of course, switch your utility bills from on-line to paper temporarily… but at least some companies will charge you an additional fee for doing do.
Why would, say, Indiana implement this in exactly the same way as New York? Different states are different states, and some are being bigger asshats about this than others. Seems to me that the states are being asked to verify things, but how strict they are about what documents are acceptable is what varies.
This may blow your mind, but I have discovered the hard way that different states approached this differently. Not all states required you to document the name change - you just filled out your marriage certificate, then you started using your married name afterwards.
This is even worse for the divorced - used to be a copy of the divorce decree used to be sufficient for a woman to go back to using her maiden name. Nope, not any more - the state of Indiana is requiring a legal name change via court and judge. So a bunch of women have gone to get their license renewed and been told nope, you have to use your married name, doesn’t matter you haven’t used it in decades, it’s your name. Have to get all your other stuff changed or pay to go in front of a judge and pay hundreds of dollars in fees to get this sorted out? Too bad, sucks to be you.
Og knows what happens to women who married, divorced, remarried… glad I don’t have to sort out THAT mess!
This is causing no end of problems here in Indiana, where people (mostly women, but a few men as well) are having their names “corrected” by the RealID process.
I was also told by a BMV supervisor that there has been an issue with people who get their birth certificates and find out the name they were told all their life was their name is not, in fact, their name. Sometimes the family swapped around the first and middle names and never made it official, but all the person’s documentation in life was in the “wrong” order of names, sometimes it was informal adoptions were birth certificate/name wasn’t changed, all sorts of variations. These people are really screwed because NONE of their documentation matches their birth certificate. They’re told to go in front of a judge and get a legal name change.
Oh, and that BMV supervisor? She told me she herself was caught in all this - apparently when she got divorced and went back to her maiden name it wasn’t official enough. She’s had to go in front of a judge and get her name “changed” to what’s she’s been using as her legal name for the past 20 years.
This happened to me. My name got “corrected” in this process (and when I tried to pull out halfway through all this mess I was told nope, you can’t do that - you started this process you can’t a license at all now unless it’s a RealID) I am almost finished with straightening out the problem, but I am in the absolutely ludicrous situation that my state-issued RealID driver’s license shows a different name than my Federally issued pilot’s license. In other words, the ID that allows me into the airport is now different than the ID that allows me to fly an airplane. ** This is stupid**
No, you can’t - the state of Indiana will not accept that. It has to be issued by the bank and mailed to you as a physical document.
Not impossible, but it annoying at best and extremely inconvenient for some people. In general, the older you are the more you have to chase about reconstructing your life. Getting most of these documents require some sort of fee to get copies or to update, or postage, and certainly it all requires time.
You’re supposed to update your driver’s license within 30 days of moving to Indiana. But you must have utility bill(s), bank statement(s), and so on mailed to you at your new address to do that… and that makes it virtually impossible for anyone to actually get this done within 30 days. Remember, if you’re moving into the state you don’t have a choice, you MUST get a RealID license. These regulations in fact make it impossible for many to comply with the law. And that is goddamned stupid.
Does this affect everyone? Of course not - some people are going to sail through all this with no problem. Have a passport in whatever name you’ve been using as your legal name? Doesn’t matter, then, if you’ve been divorced/married/divorced/your parent’s swapped your first and middle names around/whatever - what’s on the passport is your name. So someone who first got a passport 30 or 40 years ago may not have a name issue even if otherwise their name is “wrong”.
But it really does affect a subset of the population, with the majority of those being affected being women. Since the rules were (I presume) made by men it probably didn’t occur to them it would be a problem and they probably don’t care that it is.
That’s great- but as others have said, having your wife sign an affidavit is worthless as verification. And NY is willing to accept something that’s signed by you and a person claiming to be a neighbor to verify your residence. It’s all well and good that they are making it easier- but it means it is utterly worthless as verification. And if the “verification” doesn’t verify anything, why are we bothering with it? Or requiring that a residential address appear at all? I believe you said earlier that the Feds were just requiring that states verify the information that they already collected. - but that wasn’t true with SS and it’s not entirely accurate regarding residence. I may have needed to provide proof of residence for my old, standard NY license, but I didn’t have to have my residence shown on the license. It could have been my mailing address. Real ID requires that my license display my residence.
I have a job that involves verifying where people are living - we don’t do it by having them fill out a form, or having them get someone to fill out a form claiming to be their neighbor, or … We do it by unannounced visits to where they claim to be living at times of day when people are likely to be home. I understand that we don’t want to /can’t do that for everyone getting a license- but let’s not pretend a “neighbor” signing a piece of paper verifies anything.
A large percentage of people just don’t have the same documentation as you.
In particular women. I have a sibling that’s been married 4 times. So to satisfy the federal numb-nuts that means copies of 4 marriage licenses and 3 divorce decrees. Paying money for each.
And that assumes these documents can be gotten. Stuff gets lost all the time.
And that assumes the place where you get your documents accepts that you are you. Some people get caught in a Catch-22. They can’t prove who they are in order to get the documents to prove who they are.
And there’s a ton of other exceptions. E.g., the state of Florida a while back decided that all Puerto Rican birth certificates were invalid since some of them were found to be questionable. Born in Puerto Rico (and a US citizen) and want a FL driver’s license? Tough.
There’s also a bunch of people in Texas from along the border whose birth was recorded by Mexican midwives the traditional way in parish records. Sorry, that’s not proof. Sucks to be you. (Or not to be you.)
This irrational smugness about about how easy it is to do this is revolting.
FYI - it wasn’t Florida that did that. Puerto Rico declared all copies of birth certificates issued before some certain date ( I think in 2010 or so ) were invaljd. * The new ones issued after that date was valid- but of course, that meant that everyone born in PR before that date needed a new copy. Which they may not have found out until they tried to get a passport or a drivers license - which means some are finding out now.
Apparently the issue was that birth certificates were stolen/sold as part of a process to obtain US passports by stealing a Puerto Rican’s identity. Another part of the problem was that in Puerto Rico , multiple official copies were needed for registration in school, for employers, registration in sports leagues or other children’s activities and so on. In my experience, just seeing the certificate or perhaps a photo copy will do in NY, but in PR they used to retain a certified copy - which meant that lots of people had access to other people’s birth certificates. When they invalidated the certificated, they also made it illegal to retain someone’s BC for these common transactions.
It’s a whole lot harder for some people than for others.
It took me about ten minutes collecting documents, and maybe 15 minutes at the DMV; and about 40 minutes getting there and back, but I had another errand in the area that day anyway so probably more like 5 minutes additional to the travel time for the other errand. But I’m not everybody.
I have utility bills mailed to me within the last 30 days, and the recent ones are still on file and ready to hand. I have a passport, and know where it is. I have my social security card, and know where that is. I had a pre-existing driver’s license for the same state and which showed my current address. All of that is pretty easy for me because I have a stable residence, don’t move much, and tend to keep things (and have space to do so). The only reason I happen to have a passport is because I took a trip out of the country once, years ago, and each time the passport came up for renewal I had enough money to pay the fees and thought I’d better renew it just in case, because it’s a whole lot easier to renew one than to get one from scratch. Lots of people have neither a passport nor a passport card. Lots of people don’t have their birth certificates (I do, but because I had the passport I didn’t need it.) Some people’s birth certificates were lost long ago in a courthouse fire or flood, or a war someplace. The only reason I’ve got mine is that it was in my mother’s records and, again, I’ve got a stable living situation and I tend to keep things – as did my mother.
And, while the name almost everybody knows me by is not the name on any of that documentation, most of my documentation, including all of the above, has the same legal name on it. Spelled the same way.
Then add in to that: I live in an area where, so long as you don’t go in at lunchtime, lines at the DMV are short; there were only three people ahead of me, and two clerks dealing with them. And I’m self employed: which means that, so long as I can pick the day to do it on, taking twenty minutes to get there, twenty minutes to get back, and about 15 minutes at the DMV – and doing that not only during the hours when the DMV is open, but during the shorter hours when they’re doing licenses – is pretty easy for me to arrange. If I had the sort of job that required standard hours and gave me half an hour for lunch – or even an hour for lunch, as the DMV lines are almost certainly, even in an area where the whole county has less population than many towns, considerably longer during standard lunch hours – it would have been somewhere between difficult and close to impossible.
When you show up to use Clear the first time, you go through an enrollment process. You provide them with ID, and answer a series of questions to confirm that you are you. Then they scan in your ID, take a picture of you, including a zoomed in scan of your eyes, and provide fingerprint scans. The next time you fly, you walk up, put your fingers on the fingerprint scanner, and look into the camera. The kiosk matches your fingerprints and eye scan, then displays a photo of you. The Clear employee looks at you and the picture, and escorts you to the TSA agent, identifying you to them by name. So they’re basically certifying to TSA that your ID has been provided and inspected, and matched to you.
The enrollment verification questions, by the way, indicated a level of scrutiny into my background that surprised me. The questions indicated things like, “which of these cars has been registered at your current address,” and “which of these addresses have you not resided at?” None of it was information I had provided to Clear, but all of which turned up on a credit and background check.
Up until the last time I renewed my license, they took my picture, printed the license, and provided it to me. But the last time I renewed, they told me that the new rules required them to mail it to me at the address listed on my license.
Note that Clear is, according to their web page, “available at 50+ airports, stadiums, and other venues nationwide.” So filtering out the “stadiums and other venues”, it’s only available at a handful of airports. If you fly out of any of the non-Clear airports, you will still need a RealID compliant ID, regardless of what the Clear rules are.
I signed up for a free Clear trial too, a few weeks ago. When I discovered how useless it’s going to be, I cancelled it.
Yeah, it’s not everywhere. So I’ll have to bring my passport I guess. I’ve used it a lot this month, including SeaTac, my home airport, and Yankee Stadium.
Why would it not work if you just want to trade in your old driver’s license (same address etc)?
Mind you, I’ll admit I’m still sore about being told that, as someone who wasn’t a citizen of either the US, France or Germany and despite having a valid US license, PennDOT required me to take 40h of driving lessons before I could qualify for a license. Since I didn’t have time for that shit and wasn’t planning on buying a car, I simply used my Spanish license whenever I took a rental.
It wasn’t a joke, I misunderstood. But I still have pretty much the same question. I looked up Clear and both Citifield and Yankee Stadium are listed. At both places, you have to go through the bag search if you have any bags
I go to Citifield all the time, including today . And I don’t see what advantage Clear gives you. I don’t need a passport or any other ID even if I don’t have Clear. Bags must be searched- what do you get to skip , the 5 second wanding?
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What they claim is you skip the line entirely. You go to a special Clear station, where they scan your eyes or fingerprints, and then a Clear agent escorts you to the front of the line, where you cut in and then are beaten to a pulp by other people in the line after the Clear agent leaves. No, wait, that last part probably doesn’t always happen. The one time I used Clear at an airport, I did get escorted to the front of the very short security line, which probably saved me 60 seconds of waiting in line, but undoubtedly there are times when it’s more useful.
The biggest time savings I’ve seen was at Denver International Airport, the day after Christmas. The TSA line filled the entire main floor. Even though it took me a few minutes to find the Clear/Pre-Check line, my entire TSA experience, from being dropped off at the curb, to boarding the train to my terminal, was seven minutes.
I can see it being useful at the airport, if it gets you on the precheck line (or to the front of the regular line. But at the stadium - the walk to and from the designated entrance will probably take longer than I would have waited in line at my usual entrance.
Then why does my 89 year old aunt have her birth certificate?
Also, if you were to get pulled over for a traffic violation, and Officer Friendly asks for license and insurance, do you think you can float by saying “stuff gets lost all the time”?