Strickland and others who have helped lead the campaign attribute the initiative’s rapid certification to Julie Luckey, mother of tech billionaire Palmer Luckey who helped seed the majority of the $10 million the campaign committee has raised in the past year.
Voting rights groups say the initiative will suppress turnout among eligible voters who don’t have the documents on hand, many of whom are disproportionately poor and people of color.
Opponents, including the state’s most powerful labor unions, plan to campaign heavily against it.
Voter fraud is rare in California. However, claims of fraud and concerns about election integrity have risen since President Donald Trump touted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Californians broadly support voter identification at the polls but are split along ideological lines when given specific details about the ballot measure, according to a 2026 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. When told the measure is meant to combat voter fraud and that it could suppress eligible votes, support dipped to 37%.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
