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NASCIO 2025 Midyear: Mobile Driver’s Licenses Fail to Fulfill Potential

Arizona’s and Utah’s CIOs tell the conference the programs require reconfiguration as an identity management platform.

Mickey McCarter is the senior editor of StateTech Magazine.

Louisiana was the first state to issue mobile driver’s licenses in 2018, and now 14 states offer them. Arizona and Utah are two of those states, and their CIOs considered the question of how to leverage the mobile driver’s license to enhance citizen services and serve as a digital proof of identity throughout government environments.

Speaking at the NASCIO 2025 Midyear Conference, Arizona CIO J.R. Sloan recalled how his state worked through an agreement with Apple, Google, Samsung and other companies to authenticate the mobile driver’s license to their consumer devices.

“We have about 1 million users who have registered with it in Arizona,” Sloan said recently, addressing a panel for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. “So, it puts us at around 20% because we’ve got 5 million people who are registered on our DMV site with credentials. I don’t have any other provider who has that kind of penetration across my citizenship.”

As such, it would be irresponsible to ignore the opportunity that driver’s licenses provide for identity management, Sloan said. And the digital license could be used to fulfill the goal of a single identity used for many purposes, reauthenticating the credential across government agencies.

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States Could Transform Driver's License for Identity Management

To realize that goal, Sloan is working with the Arizona Motor Vehicles Division to transform its digital licenses into an identity platform instead of solely an authentication solution. “The goal long term would be that it can interact with a number of other identity providers,” he said. “Those credentials can be valid, and it can be passed through and used to authenticate to your application.”

Because Arizona MVD has a lot of data on state citizens, government services could use that information to validate identities. “We want to make sure that we can support the right verification solution for the right problem,” Sloan said. “We want to make sure that there’s space for the third-party verification solutions to interact with our product on their operator.”

Such a system would gain buy-in from Arizona state agencies, which operate in a federated model. Many of them use different identity verification solutions, but standard adoption could bring them together to embrace the mobile driver’s license.

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Facilities Lack Infrastructure, Incentives to Accept MDL

Utah CIO Alan Fuller carries his mobile driver’s license on his phone, and the Transportation Security Administration advertises accepting the Utah MDL as a valid form of identification. But when he recently took an international trip, the device reader at his home airport was broken. The transportation security officer checking credentials was confused as to how to read it otherwise, and he encouraged Fuller to use his physical credential. Fuller also tried to use the mobile credential at another airport in his travels, and that too failed.

“It’s getting to the point where TSA recognizes they need it, but airlines often don’t. And I don’t know if a hotel does; I don’t know if banks do. So, we have an adoption problem, and adoption is absolutely essential,” Fuller said at NASCIO 2025 Midyear.

Fuller and Sloan agreed that service providers should be able to authenticate the mobile driver’s license without maintaining a log, because that turns the state credential into a surveillance tool. “The answer for an MDL is to look at the ISO standards,” Fuller said.

“I don’t want to be negative about it. It’s a great first effort, and we are learning a lot. But it’s not cutting it, and we need to do something better,” he said.

States also have to work out financial incentives for app developers, Fuller acknowledged. Currently, Utah’s vendor wants to charge both the credential holder and the identity verification authority for using an app. And so, Utah citizens have to pay annually to maintain their digital mobile driver’s license, which makes them “annoyed,” particularly when they cannot use it as expected at TSA facilities and elsewhere.

In addition, the state has encountered challenges where participants have no incentive to pay into the system. The app vendor went to the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services and requested they pay $1,000 per state-owned liquor store to use the mobile driver’s license as a credential. The Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services declined to do so; it can continue to verify physical credentials at no additional cost.

“So, this go-to-market strategy is terrible,” Fuller said.

Keep this page bookmarked for our coverage of the NASCIO 2025 Midyear Conference. Follow us on the social platform X at @StateTech and the official conference account, @NASCIO. Join the conversation using the hashtag #NASCIO25.

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