Voting Rights Groups Launch Campaign to Defeat Voter ID Ballot Initiative that Would Restrict Access to the Ballot for Millions of Californians

A growing coalition of civil rights and community organizations today announced their opposition to a proposed voter ID initiative that would impose sweeping new restrictions on how every Californian casts their ballot and harm communities that already face obstacles to voting.

“This voter ID measure is not about protecting voters; it is about importing the current federal administration’s election lies and intimidation tactics into California,” said Jenny Farrell, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of California. “It would expose voters’ sensitive personal information, create new ways to reject eligible ballots, and wrongly target voters through error-prone citizenship checks.”

California’s elections are already secure. Elections officials verify voter identity at every stage of the process — at registration, at check-in, and during ballot processing. Voters’ signatures are verified on every mail ballot.

“This initiative isn’t about election security, it’s about erecting barriers that will keep eligible Californians from exercising their fundamental right to vote as citizens,” said Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California.

Yet echoing election lies by the Trump administration, proponents are submitting signatures on Monday to put a constitutional amendment to require voter ID on the November 2026 ballot. There is absolutely no evidence of widespread voter impersonation or non-citizen voting to justify requiring additional ID.

If it were to pass, the roughly 80% of California voters who vote by mail would be required to write the last four digits of a government-issued ID number on the outside of their mail ballot envelope. Those digits would pass through many hands and then sit in election records for almost two years, creating real exposure for identity theft for millions of voters. Further, a simple fixable error like a wrong digit, or forgetting to include the ID, could cause someone’s ballot to be disqualified.

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