Originally Posted by
FLLDL
I would guess that the State Dept did not begin counting the # of passports in circulation at all until 1989. They appear to have just added up the cumulative # of passports issued starting at that point and ignored all existing passports. Otherwise their numbers make zero sense at all.
The link to the state department page above has numbers going back to 1974
There is no way to make sense of the numbers, either the number in circulation was wrong or the year by year numbers are wrong for 1989, you can not in any way get the year by year numbers to match the 7 million or anything close to it.
Where ever this story is from either used bad data or was really bad at math.