When US IDs were made of cardboard

The shift from paper-based to plastic driver's licenses happened gradually across different states through the 1970s and 1980s, and looking at the cardboard-era cards reveals how primitive the security features were — and how that drove the eventual move to plastic.

The cardboard era

Early driver's licenses in the US were paper documents, sometimes laminated, with typed or handwritten information. The format varied enormously by state. Some states used small booklet formats. Others used wallet-sized cards. A few used single-sheet folded documents. The lack of standardization was itself a security problem — no single genuine format for checkers to learn.

Photo IDs were not universal. Some early licenses described the bearer rather than showing a photograph. The description format — height, weight, eye color, hair color — was the primary identity verification method for decades.

Why plastic replaced cardboard

Paper and cardboard licenses were easy to alter. Laminate could be peeled, text changed with typewriter correction fluid, and new photos substituted with minimal effort. By the 1970s, fraud was sufficiently common that states began switching to plastic card formats that were harder to alter and provided a platform for early photographic prints.

The transition also aligned with advances in commercial card printing technology. The same equipment used to produce credit cards became available for driver's license production, bringing professional printing quality to what had been a relatively low-tech document.

What remains from that era

Some states retained paper-based supplemental documents — paper driving permits, paper vehicle registration, paper title documents — well into the 2000s. The move to plastic was complete for the primary license card by the 1990s in most states but the paper-format tradition persisted in adjacent documents longer than most people realize.

The transition away from paper IDs accelerated significantly after 9/11, when the 9/11 Commission's recommendations pushed for more standardized and secure identity documentation at the federal level. REAL ID Act implementation in 2005 set the framework for the current card standards most states now follow. The resulting physical security features in today's licenses are substantially more sophisticated than anything available in the laminated paper format era.