Every year, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles issues tens of thousands of license plates. Many of the plates are specialty plates, personalized, or personalized specialty plates.
Virginia leads the nation in the number of personalized “vanity” license plates, according to the most recently available data from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Nearly 1 in 6 Virginia passenger vehicles has a personalized license plate. That’s a rate nearly five times higher than the median percentage of personalized license plates in the nation, according to the data.
Despite the high rate of personalized plates, many Virginians have their request for a vanity plate rejected. Personalized plates cannot be “profane, obscene, or vulgar in nature, sexually explicit or graphic, excretory-related,” according to the DMV’s website.
The act of vetting which personalized plates make it all the way to the bumper is a complex, “multi-layered” process, Virginia DMV spokeswoman Brandy Brubaker said in an email. Behind the scenes, there are computer programs and state workers who check every license plate request the state receives.
It starts with running each requested vanity plate through a computer program that checks the request against a list of known “objectionable messages.”
“If it is a match for a known objectionable message, the request is denied,” Brubaker said. “If it passes, but an employee is still not sure if it could be considered objectionable, they will send it for review before a diverse committee of DMV employees.”
If DMV employees don’t catch it, often other drivers will.
“We also get plates reported to us by customers,” Brubaker said. “We review each report to determine if an average person would find the message objectionable.”
Hundreds of license plates are rejected each year and the list of forbidden terms is always changing, Brubaker said.
“Think about how language, particularly slang, is always changing,” Brubaker said. “What means something in 2016 may mean something entirely different in 2017, so we are constantly updating the list of objectionable messages.”
Here are just a few of the plates the Virginia DMV rejected last year:
This story originally appeared on our sister publication, WYDaily.com.
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