In all of my years of being a traffic ticket attorney, I’ve never heard a client remark how pleasant or enjoyable it was to take a trip to the DMV. The DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) or your own personal hell, is a maze full of confusing paperwork, bureaucracies, lines, redirects, misinformation, and more lines. Something as simple as changing the address on your driver’s license can take hours. A client recently came into the office with a traffic ticket for no proof of insurance. He had misplaced his hard copy and showed the police officer his insurance card on his cell phone. The police offer would not accept this as proof and gave him a ticket for no proof of insurance. Our client was confident the DMV would see how unjust and unwarranted this was. After waiting for an hour and a half on line, he was promptly turned away because the DMV agreed with the officer that his electronic copy was not a valid one.

Harmoney Hoot of Lake Worth spent three days trying to renew her fiancé’s driver’s license. “It’s very frustrating,” said Hoot. “I’ll admit I was yelling. There were some profanities.” Due to a state law, drivers must now provide more documentation than ever to perform even the simplest tasks at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Before this state law went into effect, all you had to do was procure you old driver’s license in order to get a new one. Now, you need to cough up more ‘substantial’ identification such as a birth certificate or a passport.  Further requirements are: proof of an existent social security card (a W2 will do), and not one, but two proofs of residence in the form of a utility bill, mortgage statement, or vehicle registration and/or title.

Married women need to provide several dozen wedding photographs to prove that they are actually married and did not hyphenate their last names for the fun of it. A piece of the wedding cake will let you skip two people in line. The bigger the piece, the more people you can skip. All joking aside, married women must bring their marriage certificate if they want to renew their driver’s license. “I was not told I need a marriage certificate just to renew my license,” Lucy Garcia of Tamarac said, as she was turned away from a DMV in Lauderhill for the second time. “Who knows how much longer I’m going to be coming here?” Lauderhill, in a rare act of DMV mercy, had staff members sort through the mob of people who did not have sufficient documentation or their first tooth to prove their identity. At least the unfortunate ones that did not have the proper documentation were saved from waiting hours in line to be told that they had lost hours of their lives that they would never regain.

These documentation requirements are part of the REAL ID Act passed in 2005 by Congress in response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The DMV has now provide a ‘failsafe’ website that populates a list of documents required based on the purpose of your visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The website is Gather Go Get (http://www.gathergoget.com/). Still, this website is not all inclusive and the DMV has the distinction of turning away disappointed and frustrated masses every day. If you, like most people, have questions about a traffic ticket, DUI, Suspended Driver’s License, Speeding Ticket, License Revocation, or just your everyday Red Light Camera Ticket, do not hesitate to call our office at (954) 967-9888. Remember, I am here for you 24/7, so call me, Jason Diamond, anytime for a free consultation.