The election system I ran no longer exists.
I served as California’s chief elections officer from 1995 to 2003. In that time, my standard never varied: full participation, zero tolerance for fraud. I have never understood why those are treated as competing goals. The machinery that proves a ballot is genuine is the same machinery that lets a voter trust that their vote was accurately counted. Weaken it and you do not expand the franchise. You devalue it.
In the years since I left office, California has rewritten nearly every rule governing how a ballot travels from a voter to an election official. It did so piecemeal, one bill at a time, and never once asked Californians whether they wanted the cumulative result.
When I was secretary of state, absentee voting was a minority practice — roughly 2 million ballots, out of a total of nearly 8 million in my final general election. A voter who could not return a ballot personally could designate a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling or someone in the same household.
In 2016, Assembly Bill 1921 changed that. Any person may now collect and return any number of ballots. The law does require the person returning a ballot to write their name, their relationship to the voter and their signature on the envelope, and it bars payment to collect the ballot. But no election official verifies that the name of the intermediary is real.
In 2021, the Legislature made mail ballots universal and permanent, sending them to every name on the rolls whether or not the voter asked. In the last general election, a little more than 13 million ballots were returned by mail with a little more than 16 million cast. And in the California special election that recently passed, the number was astonishing: almost 10.5 million votes by mail out of the 11.5 million total votes cast.
Consider what that means at the point where it matters. When a mail ballot comes back, California confirms it by comparing the signature on the envelope with the signature on file. That is the verification. Not an ID, not a number — a handwriting judgment, made by county staff of varying training, applied unevenly across 58 counties with rejection rates that vary accordingly. Every year, thousands of eligible Californians have ballots set aside because a signature has changed with age or injury, and some voters never learn in time to fix it.
That is not a system anyone should defend. It is bad for security and it is bad for voters, and those are not separate complaints.
Proposition 39 on the November ballot would address this flawed system. The measure would require government-issued identification to vote in person, or the last four digits of a government ID number on a mail ballot, and would require counties to report annually on how much of their voter roll they have verified for citizenship.
I know the objections to voter ID. I would have raised some of them myself when I ran California’s elections. Requirements can, in limited cases, become barriers — and sometimes when politicians push for voter ID, some observers suspect the real goal is voter suppression. People without a driver’s license are disproportionately poor, elderly or disabled, and a rule that assumes everyone has a wallet full of documents will keep some eligible Americans from voting. That objection is serious. It is also answerable, and this measure answers it: Proposition 39 obligates the state to issue a voter ID card, free, to any voter who requests one. A requirement paired with a state duty to satisfy it is not a barrier. It is a service.
Twice during my tenure, I was asked to observe elections abroad, in Nicaragua and in Mexico. I watched voters present a card and ink a thumb so they could not vote twice. I watched people stand in the heat down dirt roads all day for the chance. What stayed with me was not the hardship. It was that citizens of countries with far less than ours had concluded that a vote that cannot be verified is a vote that will not be believed, and leaders had chosen to do the harder thing.
California is a wealthy state with a competent civil service and no excuse. We can verify our rolls, identify our voters and count quickly, and we can do all of it without turning a single eligible citizen away.
Confidence in an election is not a mood. It is built, deliberately, out of procedures that seem tedious right up until the moment a result is disputed. We have spent 20 years letting ours erode. Proposition 39 is a place to start rebuilding.
Bill Jones served in the California Assembly from 1982 to 1994 and as California secretary of state from 1995 to 2003.
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