No Stupid Questions

A few notes about the text of Prop 39:

• There is no exception from the requirement to present ID even for a provisional ballot. This means that someone who is robbed of their ID on the morning of Voting Day will have no time to get a replacement government-issued ID, nor are they allowed to cast a provisional ballot and have their ID checked later. They are SOL.
• It creates a private cause-of-action for anyone to sue the state or the counties related to their election laws, where under existing law, only those people actually affected by a law's implementation have the right to sue. In the past, wacko advocacy groups had to go find people in each county as the vehicle to bring their lawsuit, but with this change, we can reasonably expect a barrage of suits, without ever having to ostensibly vindicate the voting rights of some Californian somewhere.
• The exact type of ID (state DL, USA Passport book or card, tribal govt ID) must be designated by each voter in advance of voting. So a voter who designates their USA Passport book is out-of-luck if their passport expires two months before the election and they didn't remember to update their designation. Even if the voter has a state DL card on their person, only the pre-designated ID type is the one which will allow them to vote
• A minor point: counties would be prohibited from counting any ballots at all, including provisional ballots, until their ID or 4-digit PIN is verified. This means the verification process would become a bottleneck on the evening of Election Day. If it should happen that the state's database has problems with uptime, then the counties will be constitutionally disallowed from even doing an unofficial count of the ballots. It is well documented from 2020 and 2024 that undue delays to ballot counting will undermine confidence in the election, and also open avenues for judicial malfeasance or gross misconduct by rogue election officials. A well-timed cyber attack on the verification server on Election Day would be devastating, since it would cause lines to queue around the block, until voters have to leave the line to use the bathroom, go to work, or anything else that a prolonged voting experience would cause.
• The state would have to provide a free ID to use for voting, but this is not the same thing as a general purpose ID card. Such a "voting ID" card is single purpose, making it as easy to misplace as a card to Top Golf for infrequent golfers. It would have been much simpler and easier if the proposition mandated full-and-proper state ID be free to everyone. The other issue is that "at no charge" does not mean "without any other requirements". Nothing in the text would prevent a requirement to undergo a free-of-charge Equifax credit/identity check, for example.

These are just the obvious problems from the text of the proposition; future problems would almost certainly arise from the enabling law that implements this convoluted system. At the federal level, the SAVE Act was an unmitigated train wreck. In no way does that make Prop 39 a "moderate" or "common sense" solution that is worthy of passage. There isn't really a Goldilocks zone when it comes to restricting the vote.

It's also just not been a serious problem: of all the alleged voter fraud in the past decade, no serious suggestion has been made for the idea that fraudulent votes actually changed the result of a race. From a risk/reward perspective, intentionally casting a vote when not eligible means risking state or federal prison time, to change by 1 a vote count that usually is in the tens of thousands (city/local races) or in the millions (California-wide races).

Using a bazooka to hit a nail is guaranteed to end with collateral damage: eligible voters will have to navigate a bureaucracy to do something that their constitution said was guaranteed to them. Meanwhile, actual vote fraudster will exploit the ten other ways to cast votes improperly, because election officials will be distracted by spending their time checking IDs more carefully than even bartenders, lest they get sued by some RW nutter organization in the lead up to every election.