ORLANDO, Fla. — You might want to check your license tag. If it looks smeared or the ink is coming off, you could be at risk of getting a ticket. State officials told WFTV Thursday that there was a flaw in the yellow stickers, making it difficult for ink to adhere.
"I've never heard anything about it. That's why I contacted Channel 9," driver Shaun McManus said.
McManus is driving her boyfriend's truck, because she's afraid she'll get a ticket driving her car. When she replaced the license plate sticker on her car Wednesday, the ink smeared, making it unreadable.
"I went like this to smooth it out around the edges and everything, every bit of it in black, month and year, came off on my thumb," she said.
Not every case is that dramatic. In some cases, when drivers press down to secure the sticker only some of the ink comes off. But it's against the law to drive without having your license sticker properly displayed.
"They need to get that together cause, if that happens, police stops a person, they in big trouble, going to think it's a fake," driver Rafael Jackson said.
WFTV found out the state has known about the problem for at least one year. A spokesperson with the Florida Highway Patrol would only say the agency received complaints from pockets around the state and blamed low-quality ink.
The stickers were produced by prison inmates through a company called Pride and, when it couldn't fix the problem, the state shelled out $1 million to RR Donnely in Chicago, which gets the agency 22 million stickers annually. WFTV was told the new company is working to make things right, but it's up to drivers who have the problem to go to their local tag office and get a new sticker at no charge.
That's not good enough for McManus, who paid $30 extra for her sticker this year because the state raised the price.
"They go up on their prices and then they have a defective product," McManus said.
If you get a ticket in Orlando, police say you can always show proof of registration in your vehicle, which also has the date of when you purchased your new tag. State officials said it would've been too expensive to make all tag agencies buy new printers and print the stickers themselves.