A group of Californians are on their way to gathering enough signatures to get an initiative on the ballot that would require a voter to show ID to cast their vote.
Organizers have collected more than one million signatures and need to collect an additional 200,000 to qualify the measure for the November 2026 ballot.
In a press release, California state Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican who supports the initiative, said, “We are absolutely thrilled with the overwhelming and broad-based support for the CA Voter ID initiative — and by submitting 1.2 million signatures, we are confident this initiative will qualify for the November 2026 midterm ballot."
The voter ID initiative comes in response to Proposition 50, which eliminated the nonpartisan redistricting commission and gerrymandered the state. This proposition passed in a special election in 2025.
“With strong public backing and a mobilized team ready to collect the signatures needed, our job is simple: make sure voters get their say on this widely popular reform next November,” said Julie Luckey, chair of Californians for Voter ID and an organizational proponent of the measure.
Do Americans support voter ID laws?
The Golden State joins Nevada and North Carolina, two other states that have pending voter ID measures for the 2026 ballot.
Meanwhile, other states — Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Alaska — are targeting the registration process for voting by requiring physical documents, like birth certificates or passports, to verify citizenship.
It’s worth noting that Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s SAVE Act, or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, seeks to make this registration process a federal law.
In 2025, Utah passed a law that requires voters to include the last four digits of their state ID or social security number on their mail-in ballot.
The strong support behind the initiative in California, a blue state, makes it one of “the fastest qualifying constitutional initiatives in the history of the state of California,” as Republican strategist Ryan Erwin, the man helping lead the Californians for Voter ID campaign, told State Affairs.
The issue “polls at over 70% with Californians,” he said.
“It polls well over a majority with Democrats, nonpartisans and Republicans. So it’s really a noncontroversial way to instill additional trust in the election process.”
A Gallup poll from October 2024 found that a majority of Americans endorse early voting and voter verification.
A large majority of respondents, or 84%, said they favored photo ID requirements. That included 67% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans.
What do opponents of Voter ID laws say?
Opponents of voter ID initiatives and other such election security measures argue that the laws target minority voters and discourage them from voting.
Dora Rose, the deputy director at the League of Women Voters of California, wrote a letter to DeMaio, arguing that the bill imposes unnecessary restrictions on voting access and risks disenfranchising voters.
But, as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joe Mathews noted, the Brookings Institution‘s study from last year found that voter fraud has never altered an election outcome in the U.S. The study used data from the Heritage Foundation. Harvard and the University of Bologna‘s 2019 study also did not find any significant impact on voter turnout across different demographic groups.