A California voter ID initiative has reportedly received the required amount of signatures to appear on the November ballot after passing the 875,000-signature threshold.
Reform California, a nonpartisan political group leading the effort, submitted the “California Voter ID Initiative” petition to county officials with 1.3 million signatures, Fox Newsreported.
The group added that the petition gained bipartisan support, with signatures coming in from across the cultural and political spectrum.
If the measure passes, it would allow voters to skirt Democrats’ supermajority in the state legislature and amend California’s constitution to mandate voter ID.
It would also require election officials to verify the citizenship status of registered voters and force the state to maintain accurate voter rolls,accordingto a Reform California press release.
“Polling overwhelmingly shows a supermajority consensus for voter ID requirements,” Reform California’s chairman, Carl DeMaio, a GOP state Assemblyman, said. “The California Voter ID Initiative is a common-sense and bipartisan way to restore the trust and confidence all voters should have in our election system.”
He added, “Divisive politicians with partisan agendas will try to politicize this effort, but the fact remains over 70 percent of voters, including a majority of Democrat voters, support the initiative — and nearly half of the 1.35 million signatures we collected came from Democrats and Independents.”
“It’s common sense,” DeMaio explained. “If you need an ID to board an airplane or buy a pack of cigarettes or buy a case of beer, you should make it pretty easy to use an ID to vote in an election. This is not hard, it’s not rocket science, it’s quite simple.”
Before the initiative officially heads to the ballot, county officials must perform signature verification and report their findings to the state.
California’s current voter ID mechanisms are quite lax.
Source: VidNews » Feed
