LANSING – The Michigan Department of State is close to an agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that would make Michigan the fifth state authorized to issue enhanced driver’s licenses that can be used for crossing the Canadian and Mexican borders. Poll results released Wednesday show Michigan residents are ready to accept the additional requirements and use the new cards.
Michigan is mostly prepared to meet the May 11 deadline for new driver’s licenses and state identification cards to substantially meet federal requirements under the REAL ID Act (though it has been granted a federal waiver delaying the deadline for final action). And Brian DeBano, chief of staff for Secretary of State Terri Land, told those gathered for a Michigan State University Institute for Public Policy and Social Research forum that the department was close to an agreement that would allow residents to also turn those licenses and IDs into border crossing cards under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.
“There’s still some things that we need to do legislatively” to fully comply with REAL ID, Mr. DeBano said. But full compliance is not required until 2011.
Passports or border crossing cards will be required next year, and DeBano said the department is working to have its enhanced driver’s licenses in place by that deadline.
Washington is the only state to have the cards in place, and it took nine months to implement the program. But DeBano said Michigan should be able to have the cards ready more quickly.
“The demand is clearly there” for the cards, he said, based on the results of the IPPSR survey .
About 70 percent of residents said passports would do a better job than an enhanced driver’s license of protecting the borders, but nearly as many said they would likely use the card, once it is offered, for travel to Canada.
Particularly the border crossing cards will require collection of some additional information from residents and sharing of that information with federal law enforcement. More than 60 percent of residents said they supported collecting and sharing the information and would use the cards, according to poll results released by IPPSR at the forum.
“The survey reinforces what the Legislature did,” said Michael McDaniel, advisor on homeland security in the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.
“Clearly there’s an interest among the citizens of Michigan to prevent terrorists from entering the state,” said Edmund McGarrell, director of the MSU School of Criminal Justice.
Some 80 percent of residents agreed that keeping terrorists out of the state was an important element in developing ID cards. And 78 percent said they would favor including biometric information on the cards like a digitized photograph and fingerprints. But nearly 90 percent said they would oppose having Social Security numbers printed on the cards.
McGarrell, who presented the poll results, said those numbers held not only for residents on average, but also among the various interest groups included in the data. There was little variation among genders, political affiliations and age groups, he said.
The only difference that stood out was business travelers said they were more likely to use a passport than the driver’s license for travels to Canada, but he said the sample of business travelers was too small to determine why there was that discrepancy.
DeBano noted business travelers have other options, including the passport, and have likely already arranged to have the identification they need to get across the border.
Forum attendees questioned whether those less likely to favor adding personal information on the cards or providing that information to law enforcement would also be less likely to participate in the survey, but McGarrell said there had not been any studies yet that would indicate such a pattern.
He also noted that, if there was a group out there opposed to releasing the personal information and not willing to participate in the survey, it would likely be vocal in other ways.
Charles Ballard, director of the survey, said that could be a fault of the study but was not sure at this point there was a way to correct for it if it was.
The poll was part of IPPSR’s State of the State Survey conducted quarterly. The questions were asked during the October 10-November 26, 2007 poll of 1,001 residents and the poll had a margin of error of 3 percent.
Ballard said new questions on the issue would be included in the next round of the survey to begin in May.
McDaniel said there are still issues with the federal ID requirements, but most of them are internal government issues, and of those most deal with funding.
So far the federal government has appropriated only $90 million, including $50 million in the current fiscal year, toward REAL ID compliance efforts, Mr. McDaniel said, but estimates for compliance range between $3.9 billion and $11.6 billion.
The lower estimate is the most recent from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, but Mr. McDaniel said it includes spreading the costs over the full 11 years allowed for compliance, which could be too long for many states, and includes states issuing non-compliant IDs to about 25 percent of their populations who are older and under the act do not need to meet the higher proof of identity requirements.
But he said the cost of running the two licensing systems could be higher than the cost of having everyone comply with the new requirements.
Additionally, Homeland Security is now asking for the full $50 million to do its own project to create a central hub for searching the five databases states have to check to verify the identity of those applying for driver’s licenses.
And he said the standards for verifying a person’s identity are still somewhat unclear beyond the sources to be checked.
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