A bipartisan group of six Maine state legislators has introduced a bill, L.D. 160, which would repeal all of the provisions of Maine law enabling the state to issue driver’s licenses and state ID cards potentially compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005.

L.D. 160 was introduced yesterday and immediately referred to the Joint Committee on Transportation. No hearing on the bill has been scheduled yet.

According to a report by Randy Billings in the Portland Press-Herald, State Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn), the lead sponsor of L.D. 160, says of the REAL-ID Act that, “It’s expensive. It puts Mainers’ privacy at risk. It doesn’t protect us from terrorism.”  Rep. Libby is joined by five Democratic co-sponosrs of L.D. 160.

Legislators in a growing number of states have had second thoughts about the REAL-ID Act. Most recently, legislation was introduced in Alaska in 2022 to opt that state out of any action that would support a finding of compliance with the REAL-ID Act. Rep. Libby says proposals to opt out of REAL-ID Act compliance are in the works in at least seven states.

Enactment and implementation of L.D. 160 would make it impossible for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to continue to pretend that all states have chosen to comply with the REAL-ID Act. That, in turn, could help prompt Congress to finally recognize the need to consider repeal of the REAL-ID Act.

Compliance by states with the REAL-ID Act is optional, and to date no state complies. To comply, a state must share information on all driver’s licenses and state-issued IDs electronically with all other states. That will be impossible for any state unless and until all states upload information about all licenses and IDs to the SPEXS national ID database, the only mechanism that has been created for sharing this information nationally.

Despite this, the DHS has “certified” that all states are in compliance with the REAL-IDAct. It will take an explicit renunciation of compliance, such as enactment of Maine L.D. 160, to force the DHS to admit that not all states have chosen to comply, and to decide how to deal with holders of licenses and IDs issued by those states.

The SPEXS national ID database was created specifically to enable states to comply with the REAL-ID Act. But SPEXS is operated by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), a nominally private entity, rather than by any Federal or state government body. This enables the DHS and its allies in state motor vehicle agencies to claim, deceptively, that there is no government-operated national REAL-ID database. It also means that governance of the SPEXS  database is not subject to any state or Federal open meetings, public records, due process, privacy, transparency, or accountability rules. We don’t know with who else, including Federal agencies, SPEXS data has been shared.

Having this data aggregated from state driver licesing agencies in a single database, rather than distributed and kept spearately by stets, makes it easier to share in bulk, mine, and use as input for “artifical intelliegence” and pre-crime profiling.

Like most other states, Maine offers applicants for driver’s licenses and state IDs a choice of a “regular” or a “Real-ID compliant” card. But the REAL-ID Act requires compliant states to share information about all licenses and IDs, including noncompliant ones. So holders of  a “regular” Maine licenes or ID may be deceived into thinking they have opted out of the national REAL-ID dataabse. But their information has been uploaded to SPEXS along with that of holders of REAL-ID “compliant” licenses.

Most states have uploaded information about all their residents’ driver’s licenses and state IDs to SPEXS, as part of particpation in AAMVA’s State to State (S2S) platform.  But some of the most populous states, incluidng California and Illinois, have chosen not to participate or are precluded from doing so by their state data privacy laws.

Maine joined S2S and uploaded information about all currently valid Maine driver’s licenses and state-issued is to SPEXS just last month, on December 16, 2024.

We don’t know if this was a deliberate effort by the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles to preempt the upcoming state legislative debate on REAL-ID compliance and data sharing — but if it is, it wouldn’t be first time a state motor vehicle bureau has done something similar. In January 2017, the Alaska DMV joined S2S and uploaded information about all Alaska driver’s licenses and state IDs to SPEXS, just weeks before the Alaska legislature was scheduled to consider competing proposals to authorize, or to forbid, the DMV to comply with the REAL-ID Act.

Proponents of REAL-ID compliance by the state of Maine are making their usual array of unsupported arguments.

According to the Portland Press-Herald, REAL-ID supporters are claiming that, “If the state does not provide a Real ID option, residents would have to spend more to get a passport. The Real ID license costs about $9 per year, or $10 for older adults; a Real ID nondriver card is $5 a year; and a passport costs $16.50 per year for the first 10 years and $13 annually after that.” This ignores the real alternative to REAL-ID for all purposes except driving: a passport card, which costs $6.50 per year for the first 10 years and $3 per year to renew after that. In our experience advising people who have trouble getting licenses or IDs, it’s easier for most US citizens to get a passport card than a state-issued REAL-ID.

In Maine as in other states, boosters of REAL-ID are falsely claiming that REAL-ID will be required to fly. But that’s a lie, as the DHS and TSA know. The REAL-ID Act will affect which IDs the TSA can accept, if travelers choose to show ID, but won’t impose a new requirement to show any ID to fly. As our own experience and the responses to our Freedom Of Information Act requests show, growing numbers of people fly without ID every day.

Sometimes people fly without ID because their ID is lost or stolen, but sometimes they fly without ID because they have no ID. The consistent position of the TSA in litigation has been that no Federal law or regulation requires airline passengers ot have, carry, or show any ID.

Mainers aren’t easily intimidated by lies and empty threats. We look forward to seeing Maine take the lead in standing up to the REAL-ID Act.