Jocelyn Benson, our ambitious limousine liberal masquerading as Michigan’s Secretary of State, has once again snatched the wheel and driven the law into the ditch.
This time, it’s Real ID, the enhanced form of identification Americans are required to have by today if they want to fly domestically.
In order to obtain this new type of license, people 18 years and older must personally go to the Secretary of State office and present their old driver’s licenses, a valid passport or birth certificate, and proof of a social security number.
The IDs are a coordinated effort between the states and the federal government to improve the reliability of identification nationwide to protect the public from terrorists and scam artists.
They could also be used to prevent non-citizens from voting.
That’s an important thing, now that millions of people who poured into the country discarded their passports and travel documents on the banks of the Rio Grande.
Federal law requires that all secretaries of state make copies of people’s documentation and safeguard it for seven years.
But Benson refuses to do it.
Is there no law that Rolls Royce Joyce won’t thumb her nose at? Dead people on the voting rolls. Refusal to verify signatures. Foreign nationals casting ballots in federal elections?
And now this.
A newly released report from the Michigan Auditor General has exposed, through a random sampling, that Michigan’s DMV branch offices have not archived the proof of residency and social security numbers of Michigan residents applying for Real ID or an enhanced license a whopping 50% of the time.
When pressed by the auditor general, Benson’s office admitted that branch employees were instructed to “limit scanning documentation containing SSNs to the extent possible.”
The reason? Basically, because the secretary of state is too incompetent to reliably safeguard the information.
To make matters worse, Benson’s office certified to the federal Transportation Security Administration in December that it was indeed archiving the personal documentation as required by law, according to the audit.
It was not. And still is not.
Now, the feds are threatening their own full-blown audit.
That could mean we have to do it all over again. Another trip to the DMV for us common folk who fly cargo while JoLo jets around in her bid to become the next governor.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools. Follow him on X @Charlieleduff.
