Undeliverable: Suspended Driver’s Licenses and the Problem of Notice

In North Carolina, one in seven adult drivers currently has a suspended license for nondriving related reasons. As in many other states, in North Carolina, driver’s licenses are commonly suspended, for reasons unrelated to safety, when a person fails to appear in court in response to notice of a traffic court date or fails to pay traffic fines. Notices of traffic court dates are sent by mail, typically to the address on record at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as are subsequent notices that the consequence for nonappearance will be a driver’s license suspension. To better understand the effects of these driver’s license suspensions and whether individuals are even aware of the suspensions, we sought to survey a randomly selected 300 people in Wake County, North Carolina who had their licenses suspended between 2017–2018. We sent these surveys by mail and found something unexpected and unrelated to many of the survey questions themselves: that the addresses on file for individuals whose licenses had been suspended were often inaccurate. Over one-third of these mail surveys were returned to sender. These undeliverable mailings suggest that large numbers of people, numbering perhaps in the hundreds of thousands in North Carolina, never receive actual notice of either their court date or the drastic consequence of nonappearance. Further, they may have no idea that the state has suspended their license, and as a result, may suffer severe consequences if later stopped for driving with a revoked license. We conclude by discussing the due process and policy problems implied by these findings