Despite passage of an August 2019 law that would allow residents to designate their genders as nonbinary on their state-issued ID or drivers license,

Illinois officials say tech contract holding up availability of nonbinary IDs

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2021-06-15 03:00:04

Despite passage of an August 2019 law that would allow residents to designate their genders as nonbinary on their state-issued ID or drivers license, Illinois has yet to enable the option — and may not for at least three years.

It’s been nearly two years since Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed HB 3534, requiring the secretary of state to include an option for residents to mark their gender as nonbinary on any state forms that require a gender designation. But in 2018, a year before the law, the office of Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, which issues driver’s licenses, locked itself into a six-year contract with Idemia, an identity-management software vendor, that implemented an enterprise licensing system without including the nonbinary option.

Three years into the contract, there’s not a way to implement the option “without totally revamping the driver’s license system,” which would require a significant investment of funding and time for the technology staff in White’s office, said Dave Druker, a spokesman for the secretary of state.