As reported earlier this week, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved legislation, S 1261, to provide an alternative, Pass ID, to the federal Real ID driver’s license standard.

Pass ID would keep some of Real ID’s requirements, including digital photographs of those receiving licenses, machine-readable technology in ID cards and the presentation of birth certificates by applicants, but it would drop others.

The bill would also require the electronic verification of birth certificates, restore the digital birth-certificate requirement to the bill and would compel states to create databases for the birth certificates – but would provide the federal government only limited access to the files.

The committee dropped the Real ID requirement that commercial airline passengers of people entering federal buildings carry federally compliant identification.

The revised bill would provide passengers with more flexibility at airports if they forgot or failed to acquire a compliant ID. Transportation Security Administration officers could make informed judgments about who can board commercial airplanes; those without compliant IDs could board if they passed other security measures, and those who brought the IDs could still be refused.

The bill would require the department to send Congress annual reports on its implementation of Pass ID.