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I had another version of this at the DMV. They needed to see bills that offered proof of my residence (ie power/water/etc). Turns out they wanted them to be mai

• dheera 5y ago
  Love this. Also why does the DMV need a proof of residence? What if you live in a van?
  • mdavis6890 5y ago
    In many places your driver license is used as authoritative identification for many other things, and the assumption is that those things require this additional verification. I don't know, but I think registering to vote might be one of these things in some places (it's been a while since I registered).
    • Shared404 5y ago
      Side note: Why don't we have national ID in the US? I know many people don't want us to risk becoming a "show your papers" country, but A) We already kinda are (ever been pulled over?), and B) It just makes more sense to have something like ID be centralized, preferably with a much better model then SSN's.
      • kube-system 5y ago
        There are federal IDs in the US, of several varieties. But people are not required to have one. People mainly rely on their state drivers licenses because states regulate driving. (And most other day-to-day government interactions that require ID) If you’re the authority asking for ID, you get to decide which one to ask for.
      • showerst 5y ago
        There's a long weird history of this; the bottom line is that interest groups on all political sides hate it: 1. The ACLU-style left fear it will lead to more pervasive, easier surveillance, and more "papers please" style checks on poor people and immigrants. 2. The right hates it because it's an extension of government power, arguably a 10th amendment violation, and it would greatly simplify voting for people who traditionally vote democrat. 3. A nontrivial number of people believe (no-joke) that it would be a portent of the apocalypse, relating to the number of the beast in the book of revelation. This actually came up in a number of state legislatures as they standardized drivers licenses after 9/11. The few polls I've ever seen actually say it's fairly popular with people, but those interest groups are non trivial.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        But SSN numbers already exist
        • Shared404 5y ago
          Except knowing them is used as not just authentication, but authorization so you have to be careful using them as ID. Also, there are collisions.
  • NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    The DMV typically needs a proof of residency because you're only allowed to have one state license - the one for the state of which you're a resident.
    • GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
      What’s inherently wrong with being licensed in multiple states?
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        > What’s inherently wrong with being licensed in multiple states? Presenting, and having infraction points assigned to, different licenses for traffic offenses. Using nonresident states to avoid license restrictions in the state of residency.
  • kayodelycaon 5y ago
    In the states I've lived in, licenses and ids required proof of residency. If you can't prove you live in the state, you're not getting one.
  • 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    In many places in the US it's de-facto illegal to live in a van, in some places it's explicitly illegal. Even if the van is parked on private property it'd still be illegal to be your primary residence due to zoning. There are exceptions for RVs and boats because they have sleeping, cooking and toilet facilities (which are required to be built a certain way).
  • driverdan 5y ago
    If you live in a vehicle/RV it can be hard to prove residence. I've used UPS Store boxes but most places have caught on to that and don't allow it anymore. I've been told you can use a homeless shelter as the residence and a box as a mailing address but haven't tried it myself.
    • dheera 5y ago
      What about other lesser-known private mail boxes?
      • driverdan 5y ago
        They are all required to register as a personal mailbox company (PMB). States have DBs of these addresses and use them to filter out boxes.
  • sillystuff 5y ago
    If you do not have a physical address (e.g., live on a boat / in an RV), our local DMV will tell you to use the street address of a local homeless shelter. This probably won't get you past the requirement of utility bills in your name at that address to get a "Real ID" that allows domestic flights without a passport, though. Same thing for getting a PO box, you need a physical address first. The post office will tell you the same thing, to use the address of a homeless shelter. The folks writing these laws do not live in vans, and do not care, nor even think about the impact of their actions on folks with alternative living arrangements / folks poorer than they are.
    • dheera 5y ago
      What if you're living in a van because #vanlife and you want to drive around the country nomadically for a couple years and not because you are actually financially qualified to be homeless? Like, what if you are a millionaire living in a fancy RV driving around national parks for a couple years?
      • retzkek 5y ago
        Then you get a mail forwarding service, which gives you a proper "permanent" mailing address. DDG for "rv mail forwarding" for many options.
        • sneak 5y ago
          Which doesn't fulfill the utility bill requirement.
          • dheera 5y ago
            Just get the utilities bills sent to your mailbox. At the very least you can definitely get your bank statements sent there ...
            • SecurityLagoon 5y ago
• nedrylandJP 5y ago
  "That's a note, right? You should fold it."[1] [1]https://youtu.be/ppunAo8ckBc?t=174 https://youtu.be/ppunAo8ckBc?t=174
• function_seven 5y ago
  That’s brilliant. Like a wholesome version of “mail fraud” ;)
• devwastaken 5y ago
  Yes, they also do this for ID's, and for voter ID's. It's specifically created to prevent people whom don't have only 1 permanent address,with paper billing, being able to live their daily lives. I had to go to a local county courthouse 4 times to get a "realid" and to renew a driver's license. I had to call all sorts of people to get printed statements sent to me. It's incredibly ridiculous, I would call it completely contrary to the ethos of the United States, even. That as a citizen with all these forms of ID I still cannot readily operate as a citizen in my own country.
  • kube-system 5y ago
    The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives.
    • ginko 5y ago
      >there also isn’t any better alternatives. Of course there is. It's having a central resident registry like is common in most countries other than the US.
      • kube-system 5y ago
        That is not an alternative for the DMV. There is no central registry and they can't create one.
    • JadeNB 5y ago
      > The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives. "No-one important enough is bothered, so we haven't had to try to fix it" is a far cry from "there [aren't] any better alternatives". We're HN; that's not the hacker ethos.
      • kube-system 5y ago
        RealID requirements were written in the past and exist in the present. While it would be great to have another solution, one doesn’t exist. Happy to hear a proposal, however. I, personally, haven’t been able to come up with a more equitable idea.
• SamBam 5y ago
  Clever. Also remember to remove the printer headers and footers.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > They needed to see bills that offered proof of my residence (ie power/water/etc). Turns out they wanted them to be mailed to you, What state? Certainly, that's neither in the Federal REAL ID requirements (more stringent than most preexisting state requirements) nor most states implementation of REAL ID (which can be narrower than what REAL ID allows.) E.g., California, for REAL ID, requires documents (not necessarily bills, though those are among the things explicitly on the list of acceptable documents) that are printed (not necessarily mailed) and show the physical address.
  • SamBam 5y ago
    Which is crazy, because those would be trivially easy to fake. And then REAL ID is considered as reliable as a passport (except to fly internationally, of course), so you've bumped up the level of trust a huge amount with one simple edited printout of a bill.
    • powersnail 5y ago
      When I was applying for driver's license, I could use a printed webpage of my bank report. Which is trivial to fake, because you can just edit the address in the HTML to whatever you like and print it. I could also use a renting agreement, which of course, is also trivial to fake since they don't verify with the landlord. I think they just don't actually care where you live that much. And since they'll mail your card to that address, that place has to be associated with you somehow.
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    I would bet entire dollars it was some local person's interpretation of the requirements, rather than anything intentional at the legislative level.
  • Zak 5y ago
    I've made a couple attempts in the past to learn why proof of one's address was considered important in the REAL ID spec yet proof that is (and was in 2001) often easier to fake than obtain honestly is accepted. Each time I've come up short. Previous state IDs I got in two states did not demand any proof of my address that I can recall. Is there a good explanation of the reasoning behind this requirement documented somewhere?
• igitur 5y ago
  Similar issue at our version of the DMV, the Traffic Department. Had to provide proof of address and the only thing I had was the rental agreement with my landlord. But the copy I had was signed by me, but not countersigned by my landlord. The clerk didn't want to accept it. I told him I could just walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He paused and then accepted it.
  • e40 5y ago
    I was worried about this when I got my RealID in CA, but I printed stuff out and took it in. I use heavy printer paper and I printed it in color on a laser printer, so maybe that's why it worked? Who knows. This policy is just insane.
  • steelframe 5y ago
    > I told him I could just walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He paused and then accepted it. Well, I mean, forgery is a class C felony, at least in my state. If you had walked in with the signature on it, the clerk would have had plausible deniability. Your act of forging in front of the clerk took the plausible deniability away, making them complicit to a felony. You're really lucky they accepted it. They had no good reason to take on that legal risk.
    • igitur 5y ago
      I'm quite sure he knew what would happen if he didn't accept it. I would rejoin the queue and use another counter.
• staticassertion 5y ago
  It's so insane that this is the state of things. For some documents I have to sign they have to be printed out and signed with ink, and then scanned and not taken a picture of. Why? This is obviously way less safe than using digital signatures, which are bound to me by SSO. Anyone could sign any document with a fake signature that looks just like mine, it would be very hard for them to do a digital signature associated with my account. I get so much paper mail it's insane. Paper mail that I'm supposed to respond to with more paper mail. Fuck that.
  • Phileosopher 5y ago
    It's intellectual laziness. Bureaucrats presume that paper, feeling more "solid" than a digital copy of something, is somehow more secure. I've run across this many times when people use the word "best practices". The most safe thing is often breaking convention, so "best practices" becomes the unsafe thing everyone has done for years, even when it's _not_ industry standard or a good idea.
• bntyhntr 5y ago
  New York is possibly more lenient on these things, but after scrolling on the website I realized they allowed anything postmarked to you at the address. Fortunately I had just gotten a thank-you card in the mail with my name and address on it and that was accepted for 1 of 2 proofs of address for my RealID. And the second was just a form I signed that said I lived there, given to me by the DMV clerk when I was there. I glanced at another state out of curiosity and it seemed stricter.
• koolba 5y ago
  Get a color laser printer and print out whatever you’d like. Anybody that sees a crisp color printed paper will assume it was actually mailed to you. Another tip if you need “proof of address” is to use any notice from your State that your license or other paperwork is expiring. They’re a government agency, the paper is printed on their letterhead, and it’s addressed to you at the address you’re already trying to establish!
• shard 5y ago
  Is this recent? Which state? I just got my RealID in California in December, and tri-fold-free printed PDFs worked fine for me.
• eaenki 5y ago
  Interesting