Should California require voter and citizenship ID? Our Prop. 39 endorsement | Opinion

Proposition 39 promises to tighten California’s elections and reduce the likelihood of voter fraud. However, the measure creates more barriers than it removes, threatening to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

Prop. 39, if passed, would change California’s voting laws by requiring voters to show government-issued identification before voting in person. For mail ballots, voters would need to provide the last four digits of a government-issued ID number, such as a driver’s license number, when submitting their ballots.

It would also require state and local elections officials to make “best efforts” using government data to verify that voters are U.S. citizens. Additionally, the state would be required to issue free identification cards to voters who do not already have a qualifying ID.

In practice, Prop. 39 would add a new ID requirement to safeguards California already has, resulting in more legitimate ballots being rejected than fraudulent votes being prevented.

For this reason and others, the collective editorial boards of The Sacramento Bee, Modesto Bee, Merced Sun-Star, Fresno Bee and San Luis Obispo Tribune urge a “no” vote on Prop. 39.

“The vast majority of registrars across the state, and that includes the Sacramento area, are doing a really good job with the tools we already have in place,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School. Levitt opposes Prop. 39, as do many prominent Democrats in California.

Federal law already requires new voters who register remotely to prove who they are through documents such as a driver’s license or passport, under the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002.

Julia Gomez, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California who opposes Prop. 39, warns that adding another technical requirement to mail-in ballots only makes the process more difficult.

“For the June primary, county election officials rejected nearly 44,000 mail-in ballots because a voter’s signature did not match the signature on file, and more than 8,000 were rejected because the envelope lacked a signature,” Gomez noted. “That just means the voter forgot to sign the envelope. That’s 8,000 disenfranchised voters.”

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego, is one of two Republican legislators behind Prop. 39. The other is state Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Huntington Beach. As The Bee reported, Prop. 39 has attracted the attention of several conservative billionaires who have invested heavily in Prop. 39.

“Backers of Proposition 39, which would also require voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, raised more than $10 million so far,” wrote The Bee’s Ben Paviour in July. “At least nine billionaires, as tracked by Forbes’ list, have invested in the fundraising committee Californians for Voter ID, which is run by Julie Luckey, the mother of tech billionaire and President Donald Trump supporter Palmer Luckey.”

Supporters of Prop. 39 tout it as a vehicle to enhance voting protections in California.

“A lot of people are sick and tired of the conspiracy theories and don’t want to have low public trust and confidence in elections, and they see voter ID as the common sense bipartisan way to fix it,” DeMaio said in Paviour’s July story. “Why is that such a mystery?”

It’s not a mystery at all. Prop. 39 is bad policy.

“A voter can accidentally leave that space blank,” Gomez said. “ They can enter the wrong number. They can transpose digits, or they can simply not understand what the instructions say.”

California doesn’t have a voter fraud crisis. It has a trust crisis, fueled by national politicians — most notably Trump—who lost elections and invented conspiracies to explain it.

We urge Californians to vote “no” on Prop. 39.

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Editorials represent the collective views of the editorial boards of McClatchy Media’s California opinion teams.

They do not reflect the individual opinions of board members or the views of reporters in the news sections of The Sacramento Bee and its sister publication, the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Reporters do not participate in editorial board deliberations or weigh in on board decisions.

In Sacramento, the board includes Executive Editor Chris Fusco, California Opinion Editor Marcos Breton, opinion writers Robin Epley, Tom Philp, LeBron Antonio Hill, Cathie Anderson and op-ed editor Hannah Holzer.

In San Luis Obispo, it includes Opinion Editor Stephanie Finucane.

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This story was originally published September 23, 2026 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Should California require voter and citizenship ID? Our Prop. 39 endorsement | Opinion."