Illinois’s DMV - or, at least the suburban Chicago facility I went to - takes MasterCard, and at least one or two other credit cards (might’ve been Discover and AMEX, I don’t recall), but not Visa. I just tried searching their website and didn’t see anything about what payment forms are allowed.
A long time back, I lived for two years in Maryland, and made the acquaintance of the MVA. Among other things, they refused to accept a check made out to the “Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration”. It had to be made out to “Motor Vehicle Administration”.
In my state, a few years back they revamped the whole service area, and set up a process that was efficient, renovated the offices so it was comfortable to wait the relatively short time you needed, and in general made the process much more pleasant. That lasted for about two years. My guess is they cut counter staff to save money, and had to rip out the comfortable waiting area so they could cram more chairs in to accommodate the increased wait time. The waiting area now sports a Siberian labor camp motif. They only got the ability to handle credit cards about five years ago. And, there is no priority on developing a web-based process.
It sucks major.
This thread is 6-1/2 years old. Have you been waiting at the DMV all this time? 
For my part, my nightmare at the Connecticut DMV was waiting for several hours only to find that they no longer did my transaction at the DMV counter. Nor did they do it online. Instead, you had to call and wait on hold for several hours. (I was trying to find out why my new vehicle title had not yet been issued.)
The other stupid thing was that I actually had to call the DMV several times, because the first couple of times that I called, I was told that it takes “up to 90 days to issue a new title.”
What was so aggravating was that the car dealer told me that if the title hadn’t been issued within 30 days, there was almost certainly a problem. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get the DMV to look up my file until after 90 days had passed, at which point they told me that there was a problem. :smack:
The problem turned out to be a document that the dealer supposedly failed to send them three month earlier, when I bought the car. When I contacted the dealer, he stated that the DMV had simply lost the document in question. By this point, my vehicle lender was hounding me for the vehicle title, now that more than 3 months had passed.
Thankfully, the dealer had a copy of the document, and the DMV accepted the copy, so the title was finally issued.
All in all, it was an aggravating experience, and at no point could I go in to the DMV to talk to someone about it, because in Connecticut, “title matters must be processed by mail” and if you have a question or problem, you have to call them on the phone (and wait on hold for hours).
There is a perfectly good “hate the DMV” thread going currently, and it’s fresher. 
Given that, rather than move this to IMHO, I’m going to close this one.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator