{"id":284640,"date":"2026-04-25T00:16:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T00:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/284640\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T00:16:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T00:16:18","slug":"voter-id-initiative-qualifies-for-ca-november-2026-election-calmatters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/284640\/","title":{"rendered":"Voter ID initiative qualifies for CA November 2026 election- CalMatters"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nadia Lathan<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""A\"
\n\t\t\t\tA person signs one of several different petitions at a vote center at the Huntington Beach Central Library in Huntington Beach on Nov. 4, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

Californians this fall will decide whether to require voters to show proof of citizenship before casting ballots.<\/p>\n

A GOP-backed voter ID ballot initiative<\/a> on Friday qualified for the Nov. 3 ballot,marking a significant win for San Diego Assemblymember Carl DeMaio<\/a>, who led the signature-gathering campaign. DeMaio and other Republican operatives have pushed for tighter voter restrictions in deep-blue California for years.<\/p>\n

If voters approve it, they would be required to show a government-issued ID each time they go to the polls, while mail-in ballots would need the last-four digits of an ID, such as a driver\u2019s license. The secretary of state and county election offices would also be required to verify voters\u2019 registration each time they vote.<\/p>\n

Currently, voters only need to provide an ID and Social Security number when they register to vote. Thirty-six states require or recommend voters show some form of identification at the polls, according to a 2025 report by the National Conference of State Legislatures<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an initiative that\u2019s incredibly popular amongst Democrats and Republicans,\u201d GOP state Sen. Tony Strickland<\/a> of Huntington Beach told CalMatters. \u201cI think the only way we don\u2019t get this passed is if we get (outspent). So we\u2019re working very hard with an on-the-ground campaign apparatus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strickland and others who have helped lead the campaign attribute the initiative\u2019s rapid certification to Julie Luckey, mother of tech billionaire Palmer Luckey who helped seed the majority of the $10 million the campaign committee has raised in the past year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Voting rights groups say the initiative will suppress turnout among eligible voters who don\u2019t have the documents on hand, many of whom are disproportionately poor and people of color.<\/p>\n

Opponents, including the state\u2019s most powerful labor unions, plan to campaign heavily against it.<\/p>\n

Voter fraud is rare in California. However, claims of fraud and concerns about election integrity have risen since President Donald Trump touted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.<\/p>\n

Californians broadly support voter identification at the polls but are split along ideological lines when given specific details about the ballot measure, according to a 2026 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies<\/a>. When told the measure is meant to combat voter fraud and that it could suppress eligible votes, support dipped to 37%.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Nadia Lathan, CalMatters A person signs one of several different petitions at a vote center at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4480,7,1708,9,8,6198,1710,97876],"class_list":{"0":"post-284640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-ballot-measure","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-california-elections","11":"tag-california-headlines","12":"tag-california-news","13":"tag-california-republicans","14":"tag-voting","15":"tag-votingmatters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}