California voter ID initiative will qualify for November ballot, Secretary of State says
A California voter identification ballot initiative appears to have qualified for a November vote, according to state's top election official.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced on Friday that the "Californians for Voter ID" initiative has enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. In a memo to the state's county clerks and registrars, Weber said official certification would happen in June for the November 3 general election ballot.
The initiative would amend the state constitution to require voters to present government-issued identification in order to vote in person. Voters who cast their ballots by mail would be required to provide the last four digits of their identification document.
Valid forms of identifications would include a driver's license, a passport, birth certificate, or social security card. The initiative also would require election officials to verify that voters are U.S. citizens by cross-referencing voter rolls with Social Security records or DMV citizenship data.
The initiative's sponsors are Republican state Assemblymember Carl DeMaio of San Diego and Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland of Huntington Beach, along with business owner Donald DiCostanzo. Supporters of the initiative say that it would restore public trust in elections and that California's "automatic voter registration" process through the DMV is vulnerable to and can inadvertently add non-citizens to the rolls.
Opponents to the initiative say the measure is a form of voter suppression and that such laws disproportionately target communities that are less likely to have current, government-issued IDs. Critics also point out that government databases often have errors or have not been updated, and the cross-checks will lead to eligible voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.
A recent poll by the University of California, Berkeley showed more than half of California voters support a requirement that voters show proof of citizenship when they cast a ballot. The poll by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies also showed a partisan divide on the issue, with 85% of Republicans favoring the requirement, while only 38% of Democrats being in favor.
The ACLU noted that a 2017 Brookings Institution analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation's election database found only 77 documented instances of non-citizens voting out of billions of ballots cast over a 20-year period.
