Why paper IDs disappeared in the US

Paper driver's licenses were the norm in the US well into the 1970s and persisted in some states even longer. The transition to laminated plastic and eventually to polycarbonate cards happened for specific reasons that are worth understanding.

The fraud problem with paper

Paper documents are easy to alter — ink can be removed with solvents, text can be overtyped, photos can be swapped. A paper license from the 1960s or 1970s offered almost no protection against basic document fraud. States with paper licenses reported consistent problems with alterations to the birth date field, which was the primary target since it determined alcohol purchase eligibility.

The introduction of laminated plastic cards starting in the late 1970s significantly raised the difficulty of alteration. Removing a laminate to alter the underlying card damages the laminate visibly. This did not eliminate fraud, but it raised the effort required and made alterations detectable to anyone who knew what to look for.

Federal standardization pressure

The process accelerated after September 11, 2001. The 9/11 Commission report identified driver's licenses as a vulnerability in the identity verification system — several hijackers had obtained valid state IDs using fraudulent documents. The REAL ID Act of 2005 created minimum standards that effectively required states to move to more secure card formats if they had not already.

Polycarbonate vs PVC laminate

The shift from PVC laminate to polycarbonate started in the early 2000s for high-security applications and spread to state IDs through the 2010s. Polycarbonate's primary advantage is that the card layers are molecularly fused rather than glued together, making delamination attacks essentially impossible. The laser engraving capability of polycarbonate also allows personalisation to be built into the card structure rather than printed on the surface.

The direction of travel has been consistently toward making the document harder to alter rather than harder to produce. Each generation adds features that protect the card's existing data rather than features that are primarily visual.