caprops.org · All 14 California propositions · One-page cheat sheet
California ballot, November 3, 2026: what it does, who's paying, and why
Who paid to put it on the ballot Richard Uihlein and Reform California, through a petition drive.
History A Republican voter ID bill (AB 25) was voted down in committee in April 2025, and its backers, including Carl DeMaio, then launched this petition. Huntington Beach voters approved local voter ID in 2024; a state appeals court struck it down in 2025.11,12
Cost to taxpayers Tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of dollars a year for counties to carry out.13
Requires government-issued ID to vote in person, requires mail voters to provide the last four digits of an ID number, and requires election officials to verify that all registered voters are U.S. citizens.13
Under current law, people must swear they are U.S. citizens, under penalty of perjury, to register to vote, and mail ballot signatures are checked against voter records. This measure adds ID requirements on top of those rules. It is a constitutional amendment, so changing it later would require another statewide vote.13,14
Evidence Proven fraud is rare. The conservative Heritage Foundation's database held 10 cases of in-person voter impersonation, the only fraud an ID at the polls can stop (a 2017 count by the Brennan Center, which opposes strict ID laws), and fewer than 100 noncitizen voting cases nationwide since the 1980s. California doesn't track how many noncitizens are removed from its voter rolls. When Texas began requiring an ID number on mail ballots in 2022, 1 in 8 mail ballots in its first election were rejected, mostly for a missing number.6,7,8,9