Pics are kind of blurry, but to me it looks like maybe a strike through grease, but in the pics the area with "missing" letters looks to have a small color difference. If it looks like that in hand, probably PMD. If not, probably a greaser, worth a buck or so. I don't know a lot about errors though, this is just a half ( maybe 3/4 ) educated guess. Someone who knows more should come along soon.
That looks struck through grease to me. I see an awful lot of LMCs with the very dim S on STATES because of this. Many in higher circulated or MS grades. It's a fairly common occurrence and doesn't add much value. IMHO gary
I used to think that this was struck through grease but there were just too many with the exact issue in the same place. About 90% of all the "struck through grease' errors that I saw from the 80's and 90's were in this location. I realised that the area that is effected is opposite Lincoln's shoulder, the highest relief area on the obverse. I believe this is from a "weak strike", that is, the metal flows into the die at the shoulder and there isn't enough metal left to fill the reverse die in that area. The fact that this doesn't seem to be as common on the Lincolns from the 2000's when the profile was reduced seems to support this theory. What do others think? Richard
Errors like this became more common when the mints started using cheaper metals to mint coins. If I'm not mistaken.
Might be a strike through grease, might just be a weak strike problem. Like Ziggy said that area has a tendancy not to strike up well due to problems with the deep shoulder area on the other side of the coin.
I agree with Ziggy. I've seen this hundreds of times on LMC'c back into the 70's. I think it was a metal flow issue with the dies. At first I kept them, but after seeing so many I decided it was common.
See this on pennies all the time.I probably has 5 rolls of them but still a keeper. Yours has more wear on them than the ones I have.
Maybe the government should retain the errors and sell them on the US Mint website along with the mint sets? It would help to get us out of debt.