California could soon feel an earthquake — the political kind.
That’s because voter ID is about to qualify for the November ballot.
Reform California, the organization led by Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, one of the most effective Republicans in Sacramento, is turning in over 1.3 million signatures this week for a ballot initiative on voter ID.
The Democratic Party has long opposed voter ID. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently called it “Jim Crow 2.0,” which is his party’s label for anything it doesn’t like.
But someone forgot to tell his voters. Fully 71% of Democrats support voter ID, as do 83% of voters overall.
And why wouldn’t they? People understand that their own votes count less if others cheat.
Democrats treat voters as if they are stupid, or incapable of obtaining ID.
They even play stupid themselves.
Democrats say that minorities, the poor, and the elderly have trouble finding ID.
If that’s the case, why don’t Democrats help them? It’s not that hard.
And voter turnout among minorities has gone up, not down, in places that have introduced an ID requirement.
It’s curious that in all the lawsuits against voter ID, not one activist group has found an individual plaintiff who can claim he was denied the right to vote because he needed ID.
We have to show ID for almost everything in America, from cashing a check to boarding a flight.
When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked the public to help with shoveling snow this week, he required participants to show several forms of ID to qualify.
Voter fraud may be rare, but without voter ID, it’s impossible to know — and difficult to stop.
That may be the real reason Democrats oppose voter ID. For a decade, their turnout operation in California has depended on ballot harvesting.
Under that system — regarded as potentially fraudulent by the rest of the democratic world — party operatives can submit as many of other people’s ballots as they can carry.
Requiring ID would help restore faith in California’s elections.
Republicans are pushing a national voter ID law, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Like Democrats’ own effort to nationalize election law, in Nancy Pelosi’s H.R. 1, it has passed the House but will fail to pass the Senate because of the filibuster.
But voters in deep-blue California can set an example by passing voter ID. Once it is adopted in the Golden State, other blue states will follow.
California is solidly Democratic. But occasionally it passes common-sense reforms: Proposition 13 to limit property tax increases; Proposition 209 to limit the use of race.
Voter ID may be next. We trust that California officials will count the petition signatures fairly, and give voters a chance to have their say.
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