Maine’s Real ID Messaging Switch as Deadline Looms.
Posted May 3, 2025 by Ed Folsom.
It is May 3, 2025, and strict enforcement of the federal law that no longer allows travelers to fly on a non-Real ID-compliant Maine driver’s license is set to begin 4 days from now, on May 7, 2025. Maine officials have asked the feds for a last-minute extension. At this point, only 27% of Maine driver’s licenses and state I.D. cards are Real ID compliant, so the vast majority of Maine driver’s license and state ID holders will not be allowed to fly domestically using just their Maine license or State ID as identification. Lately, there’s a mad scramble of people trying to acquire Real ID-compliant Maine driver’s licenses. The BMV can’t keep up. Only a very small number of additional people will make the looming deadline.
I have spoken to a couple of people who tried to switch to Real ID-compliant driver’s license in the past month or so. They found it impossible to get an appointment before the deadline, and without an appointment the wait takes the better part of a day. Might Mainers be in a better position regarding Real ID compliance if the BMV hadn’t actively been informing visitors to BMV offices a couple of years back that they didn’t need a Real ID-compliant Maine license, because they could still fly without one and could just use a passport or passport card once the feds actually began enforcing Real ID compliance?
In a story in yesterday’s Portland Press Herald about the request for an extension of enforcement made by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and others, the following paragraph jumped out at me:
Bellows herself helped lead the charge against the Real ID mandate when she was executive director of the ACLU of Maine and a state senator. But in her current role, she has urged Mainers to comply with the requirement, saying some steps have been taken to address concerns about protecting people’s personal information.
And yet, when it was time to renew my Maine driver’s license in late 2022, BMV personnel handed me literature explaining why I didn’t actually need a Real ID-compliant Maine driver’s license. The clerk reinforced the literature, assuring me that a Real ID license was unnecessary. I had failed to bring my passport, so I just went ahead with a regular renewal.
The BMV did the same thing to a close relative of mine who moved back to Maine and surrendered an out-of-state license around that same time. Isn’t it strange that Maine’s BMV was trying, within the past couple of years, with the May 7, 2025 federal deadline looming, to persuade people not to bother getting a Real ID-compliant Maine driver’s license?
In any event, I can attest that this is what the Maine BMV was doing in 2022 under the leadership of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, so there’s more to the story than to say that Bellows “has urged Mainer’s to comply with the requirement.” Since when? we might legitimately ask. Perhaps Bellows’ more recent urgings are simply too-little-too-late to undo the damage from her previous messaging policies.
Personally, I did manage to set an appointment in February that allowed me to secure a Real ID-compliant Maine driver’s license in March, because carrying a Real ID license is more convenient than carrying my passport for domestic air travel. But I just glanced at my driver’s license as I was about to write this bit, and I happened to notice that the license now states my “gender,” no longer my sex. Beginning with my first driver’s license, in 1972, my license always stated my sex. But now I see, looking back, that this all changed with the 2016 renewal when I suddenly picked up a “gender” and lost a sex. My 2017-issued passport, though, reflects that I still have a sex, no “gender,” which isn’t very trendy or pop culture chic, but does do an excellent job conveying the reality that nothing about it was “assigned at birth” or adopted at some point in the meantime.
Of course, I refer to this as reality because nothing about my sex or anyone else’s was in fact “assigned” at birth or at any other time by anyone at all, and because the “gender” thing is a fiction that has opened the door to monstrous heaps of mad mischief. I also call it reality because I can, and because at this particular moment I am less likely to be figuratively hauled off to the Ministry of Love and beaten for saying it than I would have been mere months ago.
So many times over the past several years, events have reminded me of the following exchange at the Ministry of Love, between Winston, the protagonist in George Orwell’s “1984,” and his government torturer, O’Brien, regarding Winston’s insistence that 2+2 = 4:
“You are a slow learner, Winston.”
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
It is a timeless exchange.
