Gop Targets California For Ballot Fight On Voter Id

SACRAMENTO, California — Republicans' best shot at a big win on voter ID this year might come, of all places, in California, where activists today began submitting signatures to put the issue on the November ballot.

The measure would amend the state constitution to require Californians show ID for both in-person and mail-in voting and put the onus on counties and the Secretary of State to verify citizenship. Republican backers say they’ve collected more than 1.3 million signatures, and polls suggest the constitutional amendment could be competitive even in this heavily Democratic state.

For Republicans, the initiative represents an opportunity to advance one of Donald Trump’s priorities a week after the president urged lawmakers in his State of the Union address to pass federal legislation tightening voter registration standards.

While that legislation has no clear path forward in the Senate, the ballot push in California has drawn the attention and money of Republicans nationally. Passing a voter ID law in the Golden State — where ruling Democrats have long served as a foil for Trump and his allies — would be a major victory for the GOP.

“Washington is broken, and they never seem to get anything done in Washington,” said Carl DeMaio, the firebrand Republican state lawmaker behind the initiative. “So we need to move forward with this state constitutional amendment, because it's important for us to do our best job with our elections, and to do our elections right.”

DeMaio and his allies have assembled a well-funded campaign, with fundraising help from Julie Luckey, the mother of Trump-funding tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey. The group raised about $8.8 million last year, adding an additional roughly $1 million in January and February. In December, the committee received $4 million from Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, a Wisconsin shipping and packing CEO and heir to the Schlitz beer fortune.

If the measure makes the ballot, as is widely expected, polls suggest it may have traction. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey last year showed a majority of Californians favor requiring proof of citizenship both when voters register and cast ballots. Nearly 60 percent of Democrats in the state supported the idea of requiring proof of citizenship when people register to vote for the first time. That’s in line with national polls showing large numbers of Americans broadly favoring showing a government-issued photo ID to vote.

Most states already ask voters to show some form of identification at polling places, although only a handful have “strict photo ID” rules that force residents to present one or vote provisionally and come back with it later. Kansas and Arizona have proof-of-citizenship requirements that have been legally disputed, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

And Republicans in recent years have enacted new state-level policies enacting photo-ID rules or tightening the forms of identification voters can present to cast ballots. (Interestingly, Wyoming in 2023 started allowing voters to use concealed-carry permits as ID.)

But for Republicans, advancing conservative-leaning policy in California, the nation’s most populous state, would be a monumental prize. And DeMaio has had some success at the ballot box before. Voters in 2018 recalled an Orange County state senator over his support for a gas tax increase, a campaign he spearheaded.

DeMaio made his name as a local political figure and talk radio host in San Diego and now stars in a YouTube show and runs the conservative Reform California political action committee. He has been fighting to advance voter ID legislation almost since he got to the Capitol, and already tried and failed to get an “election integrity” measure on the ballot in 2023.

Like other Republicans, he says such a requirement would restore faith in California’s election system, although there’s no evidence of widespread illegal voting in the state.

But a decade of fraud allegations has punched holes in voters’ faith in elections, said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit that works to improve the voting process.

“A lot of people overlook the fact that when you sign the roster at a voting site, or when you sign your vote-by-mail ballot envelope, you're signing under penalty of perjury,” Alexander said. In

“... I do think that that has been a powerful deterrent. But at this point, there are these perception issues that exist today that weren't present 10 years ago.”

And in a year when the number — and cost — of ballot measures in California is exploding, it’s unclear how much money Democrats are prepared to spend campaigning against the measure.

Some Democratic groups — including labor heavyweight SEIU, which was prominently involved in last year’s Proposition 50 gerrymandering campaign — are in the beginning stages of organizing an opposition campaign. That’s after some Democrats as recently as last week were questioning the initiative’s chances of making it to the ballot, even though proponents say they’ve collected more than 1.3 million signatures and only need about 875,000.

“If they’re good signatures,” said Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat who chairs the Assembly Committee on Elections, when asked about the measure qualifying.

“We’re monitoring and talking among ourselves and will continue to do that,” she said.

In the likelihood the measure qualifies and they need to stand up a campaign, Democrats are already signaling that they will deploy the “California vs. Trump” messaging the party used with success in the Prop 50 redistricting effort.

“DeMaio’s initiative is straight out of Trump’s playbook to silence Black and Brown voters,” said Tia Orr, SEIU executive director, in a statement to POLITICO. “Let’s be clear: this isn’t about election security. This is about power. They know they can’t win on a level playing field, so they’re trying to rig the rules instead.”

And they are banking on private polling that shows DeMaio’s measure, as written, isn’t as popular as the broader concept of voter ID. A David Binder Research poll shared with POLITICO surveyed 800 likely California voters in mid-January using the measure’s title and summary.

The results — 48 percent in favor of the initiative, 47 percent opposed — are far less bullish for Republicans.

But they aren’t a runaway for Democrats, either. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist in California who was a co-founder of the anti-Donald Trump Lincoln Project, said Democrats should use the voter ID measure as an opportunity to push a more progressive policy — universal voter registration — in the state instead of fighting it.

“It would be a complete waste of money and very bad politics to oppose something that people want this much,” Madrid said.

Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.

A version of this report first appeared in California Playbook PM.