A lot of talk has been made in recent months about national-standards for drivers' licenses, and of making sure that all states join a national database instead of just the 30% or whatever that are part of it now.
After watching how George has been fighting with them now, for nigh on eight months, I can't help but think we were far better off when the state DMVs were all balkanized and didn't speak to each other.
The first problem is that the various states don't just "look at" other states' data, they actually - for reasons passing understanding - repeat it. For example: George is trying to get a NY license. He is told that "his NYS driving record is clean, except that there's a hold on your license from Nevada for an unpaid ticket." So he calls Nevada. What's the "hold"? a ticket from New York. In other words, New York is trusting Nevada to tell New York about New York tickets. What the fuck?
We won't even go into how he got a ticket in a state he's never even been in. Or how they had to track down a ticket in the system "the hard way" because the ticket that New York "doesn't show" that Nevada does is actually real, but has bad birth-date info on it, so NY doesn't show it (or, apparently care to chase it down), but Nevada does. Of course, Nevada also had the wrong ticket number (because it wasn't, apparently, an electronic transfer, it was data-entry, because they transposed a Q into an O.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention -- each of these states that "copied" the data (often, as above, that copied it wrong) demands a monetary tithe to take the "hold" off, even though the hold wasn't even for a ticket in their state in the first place! In the worst case scenario, you could get a ticket in New York and have to pay forty-nine other fucking states to get the various holds removed.
Seriously. We want to add more of this bureaucratic nonsense?