What Alabamians should know about renewing their driver licenses

The difference between 16 and my current age is a multiple of 4, which means it’s time to renew my driver license. I got a STAR ID license this time.

staridAlabamians, do you know about STAR ID? It’s kind of a big deal, so I’m surprised the state isn’t publicizing it more effectively. It’s an identification card that requires substantially more proof of identity and residence than a regular identification card. Eventually—soon—you’ll need one to fly. It’s required right now to enter certain federal installations, and the way it all reads, it sounds as if you may ultimately need one to get on the arsenal.

(They keep pushing the deadlines back. Pay attention, but it’s probably in your interest to make the effort for the STAR ID when it’s time to renew your license, was my takeaway.)

Here are the things I learned obtaining my STAR ID driver license:

  • You need a certified copy of your birth certificate. This isn’t the cutesy-pie paper with the flowery script and your footprints on it, but the official state document. Don’t know where yours is? Fortunately, it’s easy to get. If you were born in Alabama, any county health department can get you a certified copy for $15 and half an hour. (Or, your passport works too.)
  • You need your Social Security card. Don’t know where yours is? That’s a little less pleasant, but still highly doable.
  • You need two other pieces of documentation. Look at the third list here. It’s not a scary list.
  • STAR ID is available only at the Department of Public Safety’s Driver License examining offices. Wherever you go to take a written test for a learner license or vessel certification is where you have to go for STAR ID. Satellite offices won’t work. In my county on the day I went, this office was staffed by a lovely 30ish blonde woman with an impeccable manicure who hasn’t smiled in ten years. If she isn’t a dominatrix, then what a waste.
  • The vision test may wreak havoc with you if you’re almost-but-not-quite to bifocals. If you’re employing a strategy in which you have one contact lens for distance and one for up close, then I suggest you put two up-close lenses in for this errand. I was perilously close to leaving empty-handed after waiting over an hour.
  • The STAR ID costs the same as a regular driver license. Unfortunately, that has jumped to $36.25 (!). So be ready for that.
  • If you get a STAR ID, you have to do it the same way when you renew. You must go to the state office, and bring all of the documentation again. (UPDATE: My friend Jenny reports that you can renew twice without documentation.)

BoWilliams.com is a personal blog that exists primarily for my pleasure. It’s not a site with any sort of official sanction when it comes to state law. I reasonably believe that everything above was accurate when I published it, but double-check me against official sources before acting on anything I wrote.

Good luck!

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11 thoughts on “What Alabamians should know about renewing their driver licenses”

  1. How timely. I had already planned to go renew my Star ID tomorrow. Got my first one last summer, but alas, that doesn’t reset the expiration timer, which goes off for me on May 1. But I go to the DMV in Decatur. Last time, I was in and out in 45 minutes.

    Reply
  2. FOUR pieces of documentation? When I already had to provide at least 2 to get my current license in the first place? This kind of nonsense drives me batty. The government has already made me jump through these hoops The fact that I have a current license proves that I have jumped through these hoops. Why can my current license not stand in for those documents? Isn’t that sort of the point of using drivers licenses as IDs?

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  3. As a crypto/cyber security nerd, this whole process makes me cringe. I believe this whole process is a federally mandated process that is supposed to “crack down on illegals” but I don’t see how it’ll be any more successful than whatever existed in the past. For a somewhat motivated person, every single one of the documents in the list is probably not too difficult to have faked. I’m sure bad people would have a standard “these 4 are the easiest path to forging” list.

    The only “real difference” I see between these IDs and mix mash of drivers license standards previously is that there’s a little more accessibility on the law enforcement side. All compliant states must basically make their DMV records (including citations and points on license) accessible to all other participating states. So your info will follow you around a little easier… whatever.

    It still doesn’t do anything to prove you are who you say you are. The flaw in the system is that the dominatrix at the DMV is going to glance at your 4 documents and suddenly materialize a high level of trust that those documents are genuine, and thus commit that trust into a digital identity that is corroborated by a piece of plastic she’ll hand you. Now when your actual identity needs to be brought into question, for whatever reason, you don’t have to sweat bullets that the law enforcement person will actually assess whether your documents are fake. You can just hand them a piece of plastic, they’ll look up the ID number on the card, and the system might as well show a big thumbs up on the screen with the caption “Nothing to worry about here Johnson… Let’s move along”.

    Identity is an interesting concept. Proving your identity in a reliable and trustable manner is actually a pretty complicated, thing to pull off. If you ever wondered why there’s still so much hackery going on about the internet these days… most of it boils down to the internet has no universally accepted, baked in mechanism of trust. If it existed, your computer would know not to trust the attacks the bad guys were throwing at you and just ignore them, thus you’d never get hacked.

    The same problem exist in the real world with people. All you have to do is find a weak point in a chain of trust, get that weak point to establish trust in you, and now the whole chain thinks you’re a swell guy that can be trusted.

    /nerdrant

    Reply
    • Tahm, mostly I just get mad when I look at what’s happened to our liberty in the name of security. I can’t believe the TSA has gotten to the point that it has. We really, really badly need to look at how Israel does it and copy it.

      The Net (Frank Costanza: “with that girl from the bus”) was a C- movie, but it did a good job of delving into what identity means.

      Reply
  4. Update: Renewed my Star ID this morning. The officer told me that they received new guidance 3 weeks ago saying that a person can have 2 subsequent renewals without showing their documents IF there are no changes. I didn’t have to present anything other than my current Star ID.

    Reply
  5. Seriously timely post. I’m due in the next few weeks myself (and I’m not a multiple of 4, i just made the mistake of leaving the state, coming back, and then getting married). I really appreciate all this info as I would have been screwed. One question you didn’t answer, do we have to go to Church St for this in Huntsville? Or can you still do this upgrade/renewal at the satellite offices?

    Reply

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