In November, California voters will have the opportunity to vote on Proposition 39. The measure, officially the Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative, would require Californians to show identification when they vote and force state officials to clean up the voter rolls and verify that the people on them are eligible citizens.
All signs suggest it will pass. A poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found in May that 71% of Californians support requiring proof of citizenship for first-time voter registration, and 54% want it required before every election. However, Attorney General Rob Bonta is trying to make sure it doesn’t pass.
His latest move came on July 21, just months before the November election, when Bonta rewrote the official ballot title for Prop 39, replacing the language he himself approved last year with a new title that proponents say is engineered to make voters reject it.
The original ballot title for the bill, approved by Bonta last year, read:
ESTABLISHES ADDITIONAL VOTER IDENTIFICATION AND CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION REQUIREMENTS. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. This measure would amend the California Constitution to further require that voters present government-issued identification at the polls or the last four digits of a government-issued identification number when voting by mail; the State provide voter identification cards on request; and elections officials annually report percentage of each county’s voters whose citizenship they have verified.
That language sat on every petition that more than 1.3 million voters signed over a year of circulation to qualify the measure for the ballot.
Bonta’s revised version reads:
PROHIBITS CITIZENS FROM VOTING UNLESS THEY PRESENT GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. Invalidates mail ballots that do not have last four digits of designated government-issued identification number written on envelope. Prohibits in-person voting without presenting government-issued identification.
Carl DeMaio, the Republican state assemblyman who chairs Reform California and serves as one of Prop 39’s official proponents, called the rewrite a “blatant attempt to rig the November election.”
“California politicians know that a supermajority of California voters support Prop 39’s bipartisan solution for Voter ID – so now they are corruptly trying to rig the election by putting a biased and dishonest title on this common-sense measure,” DeMaio said.
He also pointed out what he called the tell in Bonta’s timing. “When Rob Bonta didn’t think we could get the signatures on Prop 39, he provided a relatively fair ballot title – but now that the citizens have forced Prop 39 on the ballot, he decides at the last minute to corruptly try to rig the election against Prop 39 by changing the ballot title to a biased and dishonest one,” DeMaio said.
Hellbound and Down 