How a stronger voter ID law can alleviate doubts in California’s election system

Should California institute new ID requirements for casting a ballot? Below, a former state elections chiefs says Proposition 39 will help alleviate doubts in California’s vote. The opposing view: A civic engagement advocate worries the measure will add unnecessary new barriers to a secure and effective system.

During two terms as California’s chief elections officer, my goal in that office was simple: maximum participation and zero tolerance for fraud. Those two things are not in tension. For elections to work, they depend on each other.

A voter who doubts the process is a voter who eventually disengages. That’s why I’m supporting Proposition 39 on this November’s ballot. I hope Californians will join me.

Prop. 39 offers three improvements to voting. It requires voters to show government-issued ID to vote in-person or provide the last four digits of a government ID number to vote by mail. It directs the state to issue free ID cards to anyone who needs one, so cost is never a barrier. And it requires election officials to maintain accurate voter rolls, including verifying citizenship — something current law does not meaningfully enforce.

It doesn’t disenfranchise eligible voters. Nor does it create a poll tax: The ID is free. It brings California in line with 36 other states that already require some form of voter ID and closes a gap that has quietly persisted in our state for years: a voter file that has not been reliably scrubbed of duplicates, deceased voters or people who never should have been added in the first place.

This measure arrives at a moment worth paying attention to. It qualified for the ballot this spring with signature support from voters of every political stripe. Yet in July, the Attorney General’s office revised the official ballot title from a neutral description of what the measure does to language telling voters it “prohibits citizens from voting” unless they show ID.

That’s a striking way to describe a policy that exists in some form in most American states, including states led by both parties. I believe that every eligible voter should vote. That should serve as the basic operating principle of any election system.

I’ve seen what happens on both ends of the spectrum. In the late 1990s, I traveled to Mexico with a delegation from the McCain Institute to observe elections after decades of one-party rule had left the system with little credibility. I watched voters present ID and have their fingers inked so they couldn’t vote twice. I can’t say security measures alone broke the one-party grip on Mexico City’s mayoralty that year, but they were part of restoring something the system had lost: public confidence that the count reflected the vote.

California doesn’t quite have the same history as Mexico, but we do have a voter file with some inactive records. We automatically mail ballots to people who no longer live there and allow ballot harvesting that simply didn’t exist when I ran elections as secretary of state.

None of that means fraud is rampant. It means the system has fewer checks than it used to, at exactly the moment public trust in institutions is at a low ebb. 

Prop. 39 doesn’t solve every problem in American elections. It does something more modest and more achievable: it makes California’s system harder to doubt. Good election policy isn’t partisan; it’s just good policy.