A Republican-backed proposal in California to create new voter identification requirements and citizenship audits is set to appear on the ballot in November, part of a nationwide G.O.P. push to tighten voting laws.
The proposal would require voters to bring identification to the polls and provide an ID number when voting by mail. It would also require local officials to regularly check voter rolls to help ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered.
The effort in a heavily Democratic state comes as President Trump and other Republicans at the state and federal levels are trying to create stricter voting regulations through a range of new initiatives, even as documented cases of voter fraud, including voting by noncitizens, are exceedingly rare.
The California secretary of state, Shirley N. Weber, said Friday that a petition to put the measure on the ballot in her state had cleared the threshold, about 875,000 signatures, required for such initiatives to go before voters.
Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, a San Diego Republican who has led the push, said Saturday that the new requirements would help secure the election system and give people “a sense of confidence and trust that only people who are eligible are voting in our elections.”
But Democrats and voting rights advocates say that strict ID rules could make it harder for people to vote, particularly people of color and low-income voters. Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, said that California’s elections are “very secure.” She argued that the proposal would make voting harder for Californians and waste resources on a “problem that doesn’t exist.”
California voters already must provide information such as a birth date, driver’s license or Social Security number when they register to vote. The ballot measure proposes also requiring voters to provide government-issued ID at the polls. Voters using mail-in ballots, the most popular option for voting in California in recent elections, would need to provide a government-issued identification number when voting.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said most people who wish to vote have some form of identification, but that the proof-of-citizenship provisions could put a significant new burden on election officials.
Thirty-six states require voters to present some form of identification at the polls, but California is not one of them.
The battle over voting laws extends well beyond California. Last month Republican state lawmakers in Florida passed a bill requiring voters to verify their citizenship when registering.
And in recent months, Mr. Trump has demanded that lawmakers in Congress pass a bill before the midterm elections that would force voters to prove their citizenship in person upon registration, ban the use of IDs without a photo at polling places and criminalize failures to enforce such requirements. But the bill, the SAVE America Act, has shown little chance of advancing.
Laurel Rosenhall contributed reporting.
