The lamination revolution in ID cards — 1980s

Before the mid-1980s, driver's licenses in most US states were either paper documents or plastic cards with photographic prints attached. The transition to laminated plastic significantly changed both what licenses looked like and how difficult they were to tamper with. Here is how that transition happened.

The pre-lamination era

Paper licenses, common through the 1970s, were easy to alter — address changes and expiration date modifications were achievable with readily available materials. Some states used embossed or punched validation to make alteration harder, but these measures were routinely defeated. The security expectation was low because the technology to do better was expensive.

Early plastic cards

The first plastic ID cards in the late 1960s and 1970s were typically PVC cards with separate photographic prints heat-sealed or glued to the surface. The photo was still potentially removable. Card stock quality was similar to credit cards of the era, which provided moderate physical integrity improvement over paper but no meaningful security against photo substitution.

Lamination as security

Lamination — sealing the entire card including the photo under a clear plastic overlay — became widespread in the early to mid-1980s. The overlay physically covered the photo and card data, making photo substitution require destroying the laminate. States adopted different lamination techniques at different speeds, creating significant variation in security levels across the country during the transition.

The laminate itself became a security feature when states began adding embossed seals, state emblems, or microprinting within the laminate layer. This was the beginning of the layered security feature approach that current polycarbonate cards carry much further.

Looking at licenses from this era in a collection, you can trace the evolution from simple clear laminate to increasingly sophisticated overlay treatments across different states and years. The pace of security improvement was slow compared to today but the underlying logic — make the card harder to tamper with at each layer — has been consistent for forty years.