California Republicans launch voter ID ballot push, need 875K signatures by deadline

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Republicans in California are launching an effort to require voters to show ID before casting their ballots.

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio is raising funds for the initiative through his grassroots organization Reform California. The campaign requires 875,000 signatures in order to show up on the ballot in 2026.

"Voter ID is about restoring not only internal controls to improve the process but restoring public trust and confidence in our democracy," DeMaio told NBC Bay Area.

"People are harboring concerns about how our elections are being conducted, and it's hard to show and prove voter fraud because you don’t know how many votes are being fraudulently cast because there are no internal controls or checks," he said.

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Republicans in California are pushing to require voter ID with a ballot initiative. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

As of Wednesday, the petition has collected over 300,000 signatures. The petition has 129 days to collect the remaining 575,000 signees.

Across the U.S., 36 states have laws that require voters to present some form of identification to cast a ballot on Election Day. Of those, 24 require photo IDs, according to Ballotpedia.

President Donald Trump signed an election integrity executive order earlier this year that, among other things, required voters to provide proof of citizenship. The effort failed in the courts, however.

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In April, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the portions of that order that related to voter identification requirements.

U.S. President Donald Trump tries to enact voter ID requirements through an executive order. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Kollar-Kotelly maintained that Trump did not have the authority to issue such an order, as the Constitution delegates control of election regulations to Congress and states.

"Consistent with that allocation of power, Congress is currently debating legislation that would affect many of the changes the President purports to order," Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, wrote in her order. "No statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order."

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A poll from Gallup taken just before the 2024 elections found that 84% of U.S. adults were in favor of requiring voters to show identification and 83% supported requiring proof of citizenship when registering for the first time.