On January 11, 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued its final
regulations implementing the Real ID Act of 2005, the law that would federalize state
driver’s licenses and the motor vehicles departments that issue them and create the
nation’s first-ever de facto national identity card system.

To assist in the systematic evaluation of this complex issue, the ACLU has prepared this
scorecard listing all the potential problems that have been commonly identified with the
Real ID law by a variety of parties, including privacy advocates, domestic violence
victims, anti-government conservatives, religious leaders, civil libertarians and DMV
administrators. Many of these problems were identified prior to, or soon after the
enactment of the Real ID Act of 2005. Others were raised in numerous meeting between
interested parties and DHS beginning in the summer of 2005 and culminating in the more
than 21,000 public comments received by DHS in response to the proposed regulations
published by DHS in March 2007. The ACLU reviewed those proposed regulations and
introduced a Scorecard shortly after their publication. Thus, it is fair to note that DHS
had many months or years of advance notice of the potential problems that could be
raised by poorly written Real ID regulations.

Close analysis reveals shocking results; for the most part, DHS failed to respond to the
legitimate concerns of interested parties. The result is regulations that are likely
impossible to implement...