Comment by dragonwriter
4 years 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.
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?
I would bet entire dollars it was some local person's interpretation of the requirements, rather than anything intentional at the legislative level.
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.
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.