Voter ID controversy headed for California with initiative on November ballot 13%
By Jenny Jarvie79% Dakota Smith63%
4/24/2026, 4:45:18 PM
Topics: Elections, Voting Rights
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 19.9% saturation with 258 hits. Analysis detected 2,203 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,297 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 29.9% and a BS Rank of 13% (19,044 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 87.00% of the article peer group.
SACRAMENTO — California voters will have the opportunity in November to weigh in on a contentious ballot measure pushed by Republicans that would require all voters in future elections to show identification every time they vote in person or provide a special PIN when submitting mail-in ballots.
Supporters of the measure, which elections officials announced Friday had qualified for the Nov. 3 ballot, claim it would also require election officials to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens — a move that aligns with a GOP-led drive for new restrictions on voters in the wake of President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that undocumented immigrants are swaying elections by voting illegally.
Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio from San Diego and other proponents of the California voter ID initiative have been pushing for voter reform for several years, while Trump and Republicans also seek a similar initiative at the federal level.
In March, DeMaio and his political advocacy group, Reform California, submitted petitions with more than 1.3 million signatures supporting the ballot measure to county elections officials.
Critics of California’s voter ID initiative, including many legal scholars, say the ballot measure addresses a problem that does not exist.
“There’s absolutely no evidence that voters are sneaking into the polls to pretend to be somebody they’re not, or casting an absentee ballot for somebody else, deceptively,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor at Loyola Law School.
The only people who think this is an existing problem, he said, are “the equivalent of UFO enthusiasts.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, agreed, noting that numerous studies show that people voting fraudulently is extremely rare.
“Requiring identification will keep some from being able to vote, and studies have shown that this disproportionately affects lower-income individuals and people of color,” Chemerinsky said.
“The voter identification requirements are championed by Republicans because they disproportionately disadvantage Democrats.”
Levitt said he wasn’t sure that the voter ID measure would disproportionately suppress Democratic voters.
While restrictions in voter rules generally tend to have the biggest effect on marginalized voters — including young and old, rural residents, people of color and people with disabilities — it would burden infrequent voters most of all.
“There is one group that Donald Trump has unquestionably brought to the Republican Party ... less frequent voters,” Levitt said.
“So I think if your knee-jerk assumption is that this type of initiative would affect Democrats, you simply may be acting on old stereotypes that I’m not frankly sure were true even at the time, but are less true in the Trump era than they have ever been.”
Under current law, Californians are required to provide identification when registering to vote and must swear under penalty of perjury, a felony, that they are eligible to vote and are U.S. citizens.
They are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail.
If passed, the California ballot measure would require voters to present government-issued identification, such as a state driver’s license, every time they vote.
Voters mailing ballots would be required to write a four-digit number, essentially a PIN, on their ballot envelopes matching the one generated when they registered to vote.
The PIN would come from ID such as a driver’s license, or could be generated from the county.
The vast majority of Californians mail in their ballots in elections.
The measure would also require election officials to maintain accurate voter registration lists and make their “best effort” to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens by using information from government records.
“California already verifies ballots at every stage of the process,” said Angelica Salceda, director of the ACLU of Northern California’s Democracy, Speech and Technology program.
“We should not erect barriers that will keep eligible Californians from exercising their fundamental right to vote.”
Levitt raised concerns that the ballot language was poorly written.
While Reform California claims the measure would require election officials to verify the citizenship of registered voters, he said, it was not clear from the ballot language how they would do so.
There is no government registry of citizens, Levitt said.
“It doesn’t exist because when you’re born, you’re a citizen, but you do not arrive out of the womb with proof of your citizenship, and the government has literally never kept a database of all U.S. citizens,” Levitt said.
“When they say the government shall make best efforts to compare my existence against government data, there are lots of people that aren’t going to be in a government database of citizenship.”
The initiative, Levitt argued, would impose burdens on election officials and on voters that aren’t particularly clear and would likely create far more problems than they would solve.
“Inevitably, you’re going to have people who are eligible, who are citizens, who have been voting regularly, who are in some circumstances, going to get turned away,” Levitt said.
“And that problem that’s being created is, I think, likely to be many times larger than any problem that’s being fixed here.”
DeMaio said the measure differs from a federal proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, which passed the U.S.
House but stalled out this week in the Senate as key GOP senators — including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — joined Democrats in voting against adding it to a reconciliation bill.
The state ballot measure, DeMaio said, “does not do away with mail-in ballots, because voters of all political backgrounds like the convenience of mail-in ballots.
So we want to keep that convenience.”
The ballot measure needs a simple majority to pass.
A recent UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll suggested that if voters were to vote on the ballot measure today, it would likely pass.
When provided with basic information about the voter ID requirements, about 56% of California registered voters expressed support, while 39% expressed opposition.
However, the poll found that when voters were offered more context and informed that supporters say the new measure is necessary to prevent fraud and opponents say it could result in eligible voters being denied the right to vote, the results were more evenly split: 37% more likely to support and 35% more likely to oppose.
Support for voter ID dropped even more significantly when voters were told that the Republican sponsor, DeMaio, argues that it will prevent fraud and that Democrats counter that voter ID is part of Trump’s agenda to reduce the number of people of color voting.
Only 39% of voters supported the measure, and 52% opposed.
Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, told The Times that her group is committed to fighting the measure, arguing that it would make it harder for people in the state to vote.
She said that people may forget to use a PIN on their mail-in ballot, leading to their vote being disqualified.
Similar changes in Texas, she said, led to a rise in rejected ballots due to technical errors.
“It doesn’t really weed out illegal voting,” which doesn’t actually exist, she said, “but it does cause more ballots to be incorrectly flagged and ultimately rejected.”
ACLU of Northern and Southern California, Common Cause, and Disability Rights California also oppose the measure.
DeMaio filed for the ballot initiative in 2021 and 2023, but did not move forward with the signature collection process in order to fine-tune the ballot language.
He said his ballot measure wasn’t focused primarily on making sure that undocumented people don’t vote.
“That’s one element of concern that we’ve heard from some groups, but it really is making sure that, No. 1, we properly maintain our voter rolls,” he said.
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