Comment by tialaramex

Also, the common design, like with passports, provides numbers for the boxes, so e.g. 1 is "Name" and 2 is "First Name" and 5 is your license number with whichever authority issued the license. But it doesn't take a _very_ stupid person to write down stuff that's in the wrong box or not in a box at all when all of it seems like moon language to you.

Probably better to have a machine scan the identity document, not least because the machine can trivially avoid freaking out over "Nick Smith, born 2000-01-04" when the wanted criminal was actually "Mick Smith, born 2000-04-01".