License, Registration And Weight, Please

After a week or so, King e-mailed me a chart, "Items Included on a Drivers License." It's a survey of all 50 states and 12 Canadian provinces done in 1999, the most recent available. Turns out there are only 10 states in the country that do not show weight on driver's licenses: Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

I asked them why not.

Folks at the North Carolina DMV don't remember ever showing weight on their licenses. "We don't even ask about it," said soft-spoken spokesperson Marge Howell. "Somebody suggested that could get us in a lot of trouble."

Florida took weight off their licenses along with hair and eye color in 1973, DMV officials there said, when they started using photos instead.

"Do we really not have the weight?" That was Laura McPherson, spokesperson for Tennessee's Department of Public Safety. She pulled out her wallet and looked. "You're right. They have my weight on my state ID, though." She let out a gasp. "Mine's totally wrong. I'm 15 pounds heavier. Wow, when did I ever weigh that much? And I know I lied about it then, too."

McPherson later e-mailed her official response: "In July of 1989, Tennessee implemented the Classified and Commercial Driver License Program. This law brought about many changes, several of which affected the design of the driver license itself. The decision was made to leave off the weight field in order to put other pertinent data on the face of the license."

Danielle Klinger, the Pennsylvania DMV spokesperson, said they dropped weight and hair color 20 years ago. Why? "They can change," she said. "Height, maybe, yeah, with your younger drivers. But something like height or even eye color is something that's not going to change, obviously, unless someone wears color contacts. Even so, that would be noted on the driver's license, that they wear corrective lenses. But one day you could be a brunette and the next you could be a blonde. Same with a person's weight."

New York, Michigan, Connecticut and Arkansas weren't sure why they didn't use weight.

"In the 10 years I've been doing this job, I've never been asked the question," said Bill Seymour, DMV spokesperson in Connecticut. "It's probably vanity. This is the Gold Coast. You know, Botox and all."

Of all the states, only flinty "live free or die" New Hampshire, which discontinued using weight in 1999, acknowledged the obvious. "People just aren't honest about their weight," said DMV spokesperson Katie Daley. "Our law enforcement has come to conclude that that's not a correct way to determine if that's the person you're looking at. Whereas people don't tend to lie about their height."

Well, apparently they do. M en do.

Eric Ossiander, an epidemiologist with the Washington State Department of Health, decided to analyze driver's license information and let other researchers know whether it could be a valid source of data.