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The election system I ran no longer exists.
I served as California’s chief elections officer from 1995 to 2003. In that time, my standard never varied: full participation, zero tolerance for fraud. I have never understood why those are treated as competing goals. The machinery that proves a ballot is genuine is the same machinery that lets a voter trust that their vote was accurately counted. Weaken it and you do not expand the franchise. You devalue it.
In the years since I left office, California has rewritten nearly every rule governing how a ballot travels from a voter to an election official. It did so piecemeal, one bill at a time, and never once asked Californians whether they wanted the cumulative result.
When I was secretary of state, absentee voting was a minority practice — roughly 2 million ballots, out of a total of nearly 8 million in my final general election. A voter who could not return a ballot personally could designate a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling or someone in the same household.
In 2016, Assembly Bill 1921 changed that. Any person may now collect and return any number of ballots. The law does require the person returning a ballot to write their name, their relationship to the voter and their signature on the envelope, and it bars payment to collect the ballot. But no election official verifies that the name of the intermediary is real.
In 2021, the Legislature made mail ballots universal and permanent, sending them to every name on the rolls whether or not the voter asked. In the last general election, a little more than 13 million ballots were returned by mail with a little more than 16 million cast. And in the California special election that recently passed, the number was astonishing: almost 10.5 million votes by mail out of the 11.5 million total votes cast.
Consider what that means at the point where it matters. When a mail ballot comes back, California confirms it by comparing the signature on the envelope with the signature on file. That is the verification. Not an ID, not a number — a handwriting judgment, made by county staff of varying training, applied unevenly across 58 counties with rejection rates that vary accordingly. Every year, thousands of eligible Californians have ballots set aside because a signature has changed with age or injury, and some voters never learn in time to fix it.
That is not a system anyone should defend. It is bad for security and it is bad for voters, and those are not separate complaints.
Proposition 39 on the November ballot would address this flawed system. The measure would require government-issued identification to vote in person, or the last four digits of a government ID number on a mail ballot, and would require counties to report annually on how much of their voter roll they have verified for citizenship.
I know the objections to voter ID. I would have raised some of them myself when I ran California’s elections. Requirements can, in limited cases, become barriers — and sometimes when politicians push for voter ID, some observers suspect the real goal is voter suppression. People without a driver’s license are disproportionately poor, elderly or disabled, and a rule that assumes everyone has a wallet full of documents will keep some eligible Americans from voting. That objection is serious. It is also answerable, and this measure answers it: Proposition 39 obligates the state to issue a voter ID card, free, to any voter who requests one. A requirement paired with a state duty to satisfy it is not a barrier. It is a service.
Twice during my tenure, I was asked to observe elections abroad, in Nicaragua and in Mexico. I watched voters present a card and ink a thumb so they could not vote twice. I watched people stand in the heat down dirt roads all day for the chance. What stayed with me was not the hardship. It was that citizens of countries with far less than ours had concluded that a vote that cannot be verified is a vote that will not be believed, and leaders had chosen to do the harder thing.
California is a wealthy state with a competent civil service and no excuse. We can verify our rolls, identify our voters and count quickly, and we can do all of it without turning a single eligible citizen away.
Confidence in an election is not a mood. It is built, deliberately, out of procedures that seem tedious right up until the moment a result is disputed. We have spent 20 years letting ours erode. Proposition 39 is a place to start rebuilding.
Bill Jones served in the California Assembly from 1982 to 1994 and as California secretary of state from 1995 to 2003.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article contends that election security and broad participation are mutually reinforcing: voters are more likely to trust results when ballots and voter identities can be verified through clear, consistent procedures.
- It argues that California’s expanded universal mail-voting system and broad ballot-collection rules have outpaced safeguards, leaving signature comparison as the principal verification method for most mail ballots. Proposition 39 would add government-issued identification for in-person voting and an identification number for mail ballots, while requiring citizenship-verification efforts for voter rolls.[1]
- The piece maintains that signature matching can be inconsistent across counties and can reject legitimate ballots when voters’ signatures change because of age, injury or other circumstances. In this view, an identification requirement would provide a more objective safeguard than handwriting judgments alone.
- The article acknowledges that voter-ID rules can burden low-income, elderly and disabled voters, but argues that Proposition 39 addresses that concern by requiring the state to issue voter-identification cards at no cost to anyone who requests one. Supporters similarly describe the measure as combining identification requirements with free cards and improved voter-roll maintenance.[2]
- More broadly, the article presents Proposition 39 as a modest first step toward rebuilding confidence in California elections. Its supporters argue that verifying voters and citizenship status is especially important in a state where mail voting is the dominant method and where public doubts can persist even absent proven fraud.[2]
Different views on the topic
- Opponents argue that Proposition 39 adds barriers to an election system that already verifies mail ballots through signature review and has not produced evidence of widespread voting fraud. Election officials cited in reporting describe the existing system as secure, while a political-science professor characterized the proposal as a solution to a problem that has not been demonstrated.[3]
- Critics contend that the measure could cause more legitimate ballots to be rejected than fraudulent ballots to be prevented because voters could make an additional technical error when supplying identification information. Editorial boards opposing Proposition 39 point to existing rejections for signature mismatches and missing signatures as evidence that another requirement could further disenfranchise voters.[6]
- Although the measure would provide free state-issued voter cards, opponents say eligible voters without current identification—including some people who are poor, elderly, disabled, unhoused or recently moved—could still face delays, confusion or difficulty obtaining and using the required documentation.[4][7]
- Mail-voting opponents also raise privacy and identity-theft concerns, particularly because voters would place the last four digits of a government identification number on ballot envelopes. Others note that the measure’s language does not clearly resolve what identifying number would be used or how the new requirement would interact with existing signature verification.[5]
- Critics further warn that citizenship-data matching could incorrectly flag eligible citizens or remove voters from the rolls, while implementation would impose tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of dollars in annual state and local costs.[1][8]
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