Michelle Thomas planned to walk across the newly opened bridge between Detroit and Canada for her 36th birthday on Friday. She was going to use her new enhanced Michigan driver’s license, which allows for travel between the two countries without a passport.
But when her license arrived in the mail over the weekend, something was off.
“I’m looking at it and inspecting it and seeing this random man in the corner of the license where my picture is supposed to be,” she said. “I’m like, who is this?”
Great question. About 8,200 other Michigan residents were asking the same thing. One social media user said her height was wrong, too.
The Michigan secretary of state’s office said a large group of Michiganders who had recently applied for or renewed an enhanced driver’s license or state ID received a misprinted card in the mail last week.
The misprinted ID’s have a stock photo of a smiling man and a generic birth date — Jan. 1, 1967 — printed in the lower-right-hand corner instead of a secondary image of the cardholder and the cardholder’s birth date.
The misprints, the state said, occurred on Aug. 26 and were the result of an error by a vendor.
Under regulations that took effect last year, Real IDs are required to board domestic flights in the United States. Passports and other government-recognized documents that are Real ID-compliant are also accepted.
The Real ID cards are marked with a star — generally gold or black — or an American flag, and vary in appearance by state or territory. The change, nearly 20 years in the making, was slow to roll out and took effect officially last spring.
Five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — also issue enhanced IDs, which can be used for land and sea travel between Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean in lieu of a passport.
Michigan has already sent out corrected cards, and people who received misprints do not need to reapply. Affected customers can also go online or visit a secretary of state office to print a temporary identification card.
Idemia, the Virginia-based technology company that Michigan officials said was the source of the printing error, did not respond to a request for comment.
In January, about 325,000 Californians were required to replace their Real IDs because of a software glitch that affected how expiration dates were applied to some of the cards.
Ms. Thomas is not hopeful that her new card will arrive in time for her birthday. Instead, she said she’ll likely go to a local restaurant for dinner with her family.
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