An effort to qualify an initiative requiring voter identification has garnered more than 750,000 signatures of the approximately 1 million needed, according to the group behind it, Reform California. It’s likely it will reach the ballot given current signature-gathering deadlines.
Voter ID is a popular idea, so we expect it to qualify.
The measure requires voters to provide a government-issued ID for in-person voting and the last four digits of their Social Security Number for mail-in voting.
It also requires election officials to verify a person’s citizenship.
Currently, voters are required to provide identification upon registering, but not at the polls (except for those voting for the first time who didn’t include ID in the registration form).
We don’t have any problem with showing ID at the polls, provided the state allows a wide range of identification cards. Not every eligible voter has a license or passport.
When supporters claim it will restore faith in the election system, they make a decent point — even though they’re generally the ones sowing distrust in the system.
If Voter ID helps restore that faith — and it’s no real burden to show one — then fine.
But supporters often overhype the significance of the measure.
They portray California’s election system as broken and sometimes pitch this “voter integrity” measure as a fix for the Republican Party’s ongoing woes, which ignores the GOP’s waning influence long before mail-in voting became common.
Democratic candidates typically win elections in California because there are more self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than there are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. It’s not rocket science.
There’s no evidence California’s election system has failed to protect against electoral fraud. Concerns about illegal immigrants voting in elections also are vastly overblown.
There are certainly problems with our election system, such as the slow counting process driven by late vote deadlines, but the measure won’t fix them.
Furthermore, with 80% to 91% of Californians voting by mail in the last three elections, it seems hard to believe that requiring ID at a polling place would be any kind of game-changer.
The Voter ID initiative is perfectly fine if it improves public trust in elections, but it’s foolish to believe the measure is anything more than a political stunt that promotes false election-integrity narratives.