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Maine to Ditch Inappropriate Vanity Plates in Two Months, Hope You Had Fun

Maine has changed its policy on obscene license plates starting Monday, October 18, 2021. With that shift, you would expect all the nasty ones to disappear overnight, right? Well, not exactly. According to Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, it may take two to four months for the state to rid itself of obscene words on vanity plates.
Example of a Maine license plate. This one is not obscene. 25 photos
Photo: Dickelbers on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 license
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The tricky part is to decide what is allowed and what is not permitted on vanity license plates in Maine, in a way that the change will protect First Amendment rights without letting obscene plates slip under the radar.

Therefore, authorities have decided to bring public comments to the process, so that people will get to decide if certain words or combinations of letters and numbers will be allowed.

If someone has a vanity license plate that is deemed offensive, the owner of the vehicle will be notified through the mail and will then get a chance to ask for a different one. The other option is to get a generic license plate instead. Until the process is completed, requests for new custom license plates have been put on hold, NBC News reports.

The last part makes sense if you get to think about it, as it means that people might try to sneak various license plate combinations through the gates. If those got approved just before the guidelines are decided, the state of Maine must figure out if those plates are inappropriate and have to be recalled. About 400 plate combinations will have to be analyzed.

In case you were wondering why obscene license plates exist in Maine, we remind everyone that the state dropped its review process back in 2015. From there, the gates were open to all kinds of combinations of letters and numbers. According to reports, there is a license plate in Maine that features the F-word in all its glory.

The issue with those combinations that may be funny is that some are outright insults, refer to sex acts or anatomy, as well as feature messages that are racist, religiously offensive, profane, drug-related, or politically objectionable.

You must admit that you did not expect that many things to be included on a vanity license plate, right? Fortunately, nobody has made one that includes all the above. While getting a weird or funny combo may be tempting whenever ordering vanity license plates, we suggest you try to keep it classy and stick to Star Wars references.
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Editor's note: Photo gallery shows various license plates from various states and countries that have made headlines in the past few years.

About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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