This week, WIRED looked into the plight of Joseph Tartaro, a security researcher whose NULL vanity license plate at one point had him on the hook for $12,049 in fines. The problem? Apparently every time a traffic cop wrote a ticket and left the license plate blank, those citations headed straight for Tartaro’s mailbox, regardless of the actual culprit.
Tartaro has since worked to clear his name; a quick check of the Citation Processing Center’s public online database shows no tickets currently linked to NULL. But while his ordeal was agonizing, it was also far from unique. In fact, Tartaro joins a long lineage of people whose vanity plates backfired in spectacular fashion.
In a way, it’s surprising that this could happen at all. States actively police what vanity plates get approved; Utah alone has rejected around 1,000 plates over the years, and that’s not even counting those turned down for being duplicates of existing plates. Each state handles things a little differently, but Wisconsin’s lawmakers captured the prevailing ethos pretty well: “The department may refuse to issue any combination of letters or numbers, or both, which may carry connotations offensive to good taste or decency, or which would be misleading, or in conflict with the issuance of any other registration plates.”
That’s plenty broad. But too many times, it seems, states have focused too much on decency and not enough on practical outcomes. A POOPHED plate ..
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