California State Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, a Republican lawmaker in the state legislature, secured more than the necessary number of signatures to get a voter ID initiative on the November ballot.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, issued a notice on Friday announcing the development. The document lists DeMaio, California Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland, and Donald DiCostanzo of Californians for Voter ID as proponents of the proposition.
The measure seeks to amend the California Constitution to require voters to present government-issued identification at polling places or to provide the last four digits of their identification number for mail-in voting.
In California, voters are only required to provide their ID and Social Security number when they register to vote. The same is not required when voters cast their ballots.
“Voters will be able to restore election integrity in our state, citizenship verification, auditing voter rolls, and yes, requiring ID to vote,” DeMaio said in a video while standing outside the California State Capitol in Sacramento. “But the hard part is coming up. We’ve got to get the bill passed in November, and the Democrat politicians up here, they don’t want voter ID, so they’re playing all their dirty tricks.”
He did not specify what he meant by California Democrats’ “dirty tricks,” but they are likely opposed to the measure alongside civil rights groups and other organizations.
“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,” Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, said in a March 2 press release. “It would expose voters’ sensitive personal information, create new ways to reject eligible ballots, and wrongly target voters through error-prone citizenship checks.”
The constitutional amendment is similar to the SAVE America Act, a President Donald Trump-backed GOP bill that would mandate documentary proof of citizenship to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections. The legislation is currently stalled in the Senate due to unified opposition from Democrats.
DeMaio, who leads the voter ID initiative, was required to collect nearly 875,000 signatures from registered voters by March 18 to get the measure on the ballot. Before the deadline, organizers said they gathered roughly 1.3 million signatures. More than 1 million were considered valid.
Weber will certify the initiative for the general election ballot on June 25.
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DeMaio has spearheaded voter ID legislation in the past, but those attempts were unsuccessful.
The San Diego Republican introduced the California Voter ID and Election Integrity Act of 2025, which failed to make it past the committee stage. Notably, he sponsored the bill with then-California State Assemblyman Bill Essayli, who now serves the Trump administration as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.
