How we verify this

Where each fact comes from

Every field of every record carries its own source, its own method and its own date. There is no single “last updated” stamp for a whole record: an office can have hours verified yesterday from the county and a phone number still as the state publishes it, and the page says so.

• Operator's own site
  481 fields — read from the page of whoever actually runs the counter: the county tax collector, the private agency, or the county's own booking system.
• Human review
  10 fields — a person read the source and entered it by hand.
• Phone confirmed
  The highest rung: somebody calls the office. It sits above everything else because it is the only method that does not depend on the county having a working website. As of this build, 0 fields carry it.
• State table (FLHSMV)
  947 fields — published by the state. Correct until a county changes something, which is exactly what counties in transition keep doing.

Distinct sources cited in total: 11 hosts. Every record links its own.

When two sources disagree

The source closest to the counter wins, and the disagreement is logged. A phone call outranks the operator's page; the operator's page outranks the state's table; nothing outranks a phone call. A value and its citation move together: if the ladder refuses a source, neither the value nor the citation changes.

We also separate a contradiction from a gap. The state saying nothing about a service is not the state being wrong — it is the state being silent. Only two stated answers can disagree.

Booking links are a special case

A wrong opening time tells nobody: the office opens at nine, our page says eight, and nobody finds out until somebody loses a morning. A broken link tells everybody — it errors, or it lands somewhere that is not the county's. That difference is why a booking link may publish on weaker evidence than an opening time, and it only holds while a machine is checking.

Every day we fetch every link we show and record where it ends up. If it fails, or lands on a domain that is neither a public body, the county's own, nor a known appointment vendor, the link comes down that day and goes to a human. We never say we have booked through a link we have not used, and we never call a tax collector's homepage a booking portal.

What a ✓, an ✗ and a ? mean

• ✓
  A source we verified names that service at that office.
• ✗
  An ✗ comes from one of two things, and each record says which.
  1. An explicit denial. The source says so: “(NO Road Tests)”, “not available at this location”, “FLTA does NOT offer Driver License services”. That is a quotation, not a deduction, and the exact phrase is stored beside the value.
  2. Omission from the office's own list. The office publishes its own service list and that service is not on it, while other offices in the same county do write it on theirs. That last part is what turns silence into an answer: it shows the county writes that service down when it has it. This is an inference, and we state it as one. An office whose own list we could not find gets no ✗ this way at all — it omitted nothing, it said nothing.
• ?
  Nobody has said. It is not a no.

What we do not publish

A record without verified hours, phone and services does not enter the index or the sitemaps. Today that leaves 74 records out. Their page exists and says it is unverified, because a reader who has the link deserves what we know — we simply do not offer it as if it were verified.

• seed only verification
  51
• hours missing
  19
• phone missing
  4
• not active
  1

Kiosks are judged differently: they have no staff and no phone, so the bar is verified hours plus a host store, not a phone number.

When it goes stale

Past 30 days from a record's oldest verification, the page shows an amber warning. The date you see is the OLDEST tracked field, not the newest — the weak link, not the most flattering one. The site rebuilds daily, so that count is recomputed every day.

Wait times

We show only numbers read from a county's own system, in that county's own terms. Lee publishes the LONGEST wait in the queue; calling that “your wait” would be a number almost nobody experiences. Where there is no system to read, we say so.

Appointments

We link to official, free portals and to nothing else. We never book, hold or resell slots, and we never charge for booking. Where a county charges for a road test, that fee is the county's and we say so beside the link rather than sending you into it.

What we still do not know

Three counties could not be verified from their operator: one is unreachable from our network, one answers with a bot check, and one forbids crawlers in its robots.txt, which we honour. Their records keep the state's data and stay unpublished.

See something wrong on a record? Write to [email protected] naming the office — we correct it and re-date the field. · Other ways to reach us