A New York resident’s vanity plate set off a costly administrative ordeal after the word “BLANK” matched entries in local registration and ticketing systems where the license plate field had been recorded as “Blank,” linking her to violations issued to other people.
Melanie Blank Brown chose a vanity plate reading “BLANK.” Until a recent move, she did not know what was building in local records. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her plate sequence was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems. Many of those systems contained records in which the license plate number had been entered as “Blank.”
She was immediately told she had two outstanding tickets. The total eventually grew to more than 400 violations and more than $40,000 in fines. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, they could not be resolved all at once. Brown had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to get the tickets voided.
To stop the pile from growing, Brown surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed it from the pool of potential vanity plates, so another driver could not select it.
Brown’s new vanity plate reads “KNALB,” according to the account.