I’m one of the majority of American voters who aren’t particularly opposed to the concept of being required to show ID when casting a vote at the polls.
After all, in the quarter century since 9/11, I’ve gotten used to having to regularly prove my identity: to check into a hotel, pick up a prescription, buy booze, get on a plane, visit City Hall and, for a while there when credit card fraud was on the rise, when I used my VISA to buy something. So what if I have to flash my California driver’s license before I can sign the upside-down book at my local polling place?
And frankly, I don’t buy the argument against voter ID that it would be a terrible burden on people who lack current government-issued ID. Obtaining a state ID card is not particularly difficult, and pretty much every Californian needs a driver’s license or state ID card to function in the modern world. And you need one to register to vote as well. For those who are currently unable or unwilling to obtain or update ID, voting may not be their biggest concern.
If you think this is the preamble to an argument supporting Proposition 39 on the Nov. 3 ballot, however, you’d be wrong. That’s because the measure, authored by a bombastic Republican legislator and funded by a conservative billionaire from Illinois, is not just designed to stop an imposter from stopping by the polls on Election Day to vote under someone else’s name.
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That’s because Proposition 39 requires election officials to verify the citizenship of registered voters on its rolls, which is not as easy as it may sound (more on this later). It also requires voters using mail-in ballots to include the last four digits of a Social Security number or other ID on the envelope. We already sign our ballot envelope; who wants to give identity thieves another way to target us? It’s enough to drive a voter to dump their mail ballot and head for the polls.
Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), the author of Proposition 39, told me that the initiative’s provisions are just common sense, and that polls that voters in California and across the nation support voter ID. It’s true that as many 83 percent of Americans aren’t averse to showing an ID to vote, according to a 2025 Pew survey. But when voters learn the details of specific proposals, particularly those that include citizen-verification requirements, their support wanes.
Golden State staff
That is reflected in a poll released this week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. It found only 43% of likely voters support DeMaio’s measure; 55% say they are opposed.
DeMaio attributed the results to the “biased” ballot title that California Attorney General Rob Bonta placed on the measure: “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.” DeMaio sued to have it changed, but a judge rejected the challenge because Bonta’s language is accurate, if not particularly appealing.
A variety of good government and voter rights groups warn that Proposition 39 is an effort to undermine mail ballots in California given that President Trump’s attempts to do so have so far been thwarted by Congress and the courts. The editorial board of the Rupert Murdoch-owned California Post (which doesn’t reveal its members, or even if there are any) seems to agree with Proposition 39’s critics on this point. In its endorsement of the measure, the board says: “Vote-by-mail is a mess. And the only answer is voter ID, as in Proposition 39.”
That’s baloney. California’s mail-in ballot system is not a mess, except in the mind of the president and his supporters who are pushing the SAVE Act, a draconian federal bill that would demand Americans present birth certificates or passports to register to vote. (Those forms of ID really can be a hassle to obtain.)
Mariel Garza
Beyond Proposition 39’s veiled attack on mail ballots, there is a host of other problems with what Julia Gomez, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, says is a sloppily written measure. (Gomez works on voting rights and was speaking on behalf of the “no” campaign.) For example, it doesn’t say what ID would be acceptable, or set out a process for “curing” ballots so they aren’t rejected if voters forget to add an ID number, or write it down incorrectly.
DeMaio argues that using ID numbers is better because signature verification has resulted in 100,000 mail ballots a year being rejected (although many rejections, if not most, are due to ballots being received after the grace period). But the measure doesn’t say that the ID numbers will replace the signatures, so it could make matters even worse.
This isn’t a hypothetical issue. Gomez said that when Texas implemented a similar four-digit ID requirement in 2022, its rejection rates for mail ballots shot up from 1 percent to 12 percent.
Mariel Garza
Even more problematic, she said, is the citizen-verification process in the measure. “There is no sort of national database that election officials can reference that will tell you if me, Julia Gomez, who was born in the U.S. is actually a citizen,” Gomez said.
What does exist is a tool called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), developed nearly 40 years ago to verify applicants for federal benefits. In recent years it has been hastily, and problematically, expanded by the Trump administration. When ProPublica and The Texas Tribune examined the rollout of the supposedly updated system, they found it was prone to mistakes and flagged citizens as ineligible to vote.
California’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office says implementing Proposition 39, which includes a guarantee of free voter ID cards, would cost the state up to “the low hundreds of millions of dollars” to implement.
And for what? To address a problem that doesn’t exist.
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