Wisconsin Voter ID Win Buoys California GOP Activists

Although the GOP candidate for state Supreme Court lost in the hotly contested Wisconsin election in which Elon Musk played a starring role, Republicans from Musk to President Trump to GOP state legislators around the country touted the voter ID victory. Musk said, with some online blowback, that Tuesday’s silver lining will have more long-term impact than the Democrat’s judicial win.

“This was the most important thing,” Musk posted on X in response to a post that the voter ID measure had prevailed by a wide margin.  

Some 63% of Wisconsin voters Tuesday approved the measure to enshrine the state’s voter ID law in the state constitution. The Badger State already required that voters have a photo ID in order to participate at the polls, but the law is now elevated to a constitutional amendment.

The move makes Wisconsin the latest state to formalize voter ID rules, and it’s one of 36 states that have some form of voter identification requirement, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The win also is emboldening proponents of voter ID laws as far away as solidly blue California. A Gallup poll last fall found that large majorities of Americans back photo ID laws, with some 84% of Americans saying they back having “all voters” provide “photo identification at their voting place in order to vote.”

Grenell, who served as director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration, wasn’t just touting California’s voter ID campaign out of nowhere when suggesting that California would be the next state to back voter ID requirements. Before joining the Trump administration again in January, Grenell was busy as the co-chair of Fix California, a nonprofit devoted to increasing voter registration and imposing stricter voting rules around the state’s mail-in and loose ballot-harvesting laws.

Before the 2022 midterm congressional elections, Grenell said he aimed to register up to 1.4 million potential conservative voters in the state, aiming to replicate the results of Stacey Abram’s Fair Fight organization in Georgia. Late last year, California election analysts, including Rob Pyers of the nonpartisan California Target Book, reported that Republicans had increased their share of registered voters across all 58 counties and in every congressional, state senate, and assembly district.

The latest California secretary of state update in mid-March shows that Republicans have gained 1 million registered voters in California over the last eight years.

(Republican registration has ticked up to 25% of registered voters, pulling ahead of “no party preference,” which now stands at 22%. But they are still far behind the 46% of voters who are registered Democrats.)

One of Grenell’s close political allies and friends is leading the voter ID drive in California. Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, a former conservative talk show host who heads a different nonprofit, Reform California, is now focused on passing a bold 2026 ballot measure that would not only change the California constitution to require voter ID but also mandate citizenship verification to vote across the state.

In early March, DeMaio formed “Californians for Voter ID” and released polling from Public Opinion Strategies showing strong support in California for new laws requiring identification to vote. Some 68% of all Californians back a change requiring an ID when casting a ballot, including 93% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats, according to the poll. The survey also found that a whopping 72% of Californians support verifying citizenship for anyone wishing to register to vote.

Proponents of voter ID laws argue they boost the public’s trust in election outcomes and reduce voter fraud. Critics contend that such rules disproportionately prevent voters of color, low-income, and older voters from vesting ballots because those groups are more likely to lack some form of photo ID.

Right now, citizenship is required to vote under California law, but voter registrations through the state’s online DMV application only require California residents to check a box marked “U.S. citizen” without requiring proof. DeMaio has mocked the process as only requiring “pinky swearing” that residents are citizens.

“Here’s the deal. Neither side should ever be in doubt about the integrity of an election,” DeMaio said during remarks at the California GOP convention in mid-March. “If you have a third of voters of any party upset with the integrity of an election, you have a problem with your democracy, and you must fix it, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.”

DeMaio then introduced then-Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a Republican representing Riverside, California, who had co-authored several voter ID bills with him over the last few months. Trump this week named Essayli, 39, as U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, an office employing more than 250 lawyers.

In addition to Essayli, DeMaio’s voter ID coalition partners include GOP Rep. Ken Calvert, the longest-serving Republican in the California congressional delegation who narrowly won his election by three percentage points in 2024. Other players are Julie Luckey, mother of tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, a big Trump funder, and the Lincoln Club of Orange County, a conservative organization.

Despite the majority support for voter ID laws in California and nationwide, DeMaio is well aware that getting a constitutional amendment passed is no easy feat. The assemblyman pursued an unsuccessful “election integrity” ballot initiative in 2023, which didn’t end up qualifying because it failed to attract enough signatures and financial backing.

This time, DeMaio believes he has the wind at his back, although he’s leaving nothing to chance. He says he’s already enlisting thousands of volunteers across the state to gather the 1 million signatures needed to qualify and has garnered financial commitments from big Trump donors to help make that happen.

DeMaio told supporters on a conference call last week that these “big Trump donors” have committed $16 million to help qualify the initiative but will release the money only if the grassroots donor campaign hits a $3 million target to unlock the funds. The funds will pay for social media ads and text messages to support the campaign, legal work to draft and file the initiative, paid signature gatherers, and the costs of printing and sending petition kits across the state. DeMaio is also planning a statewide bus tour with rallies every month in different areas of the state.

During the late March conference call, DeMaio outlined several key upcoming deadlines for the voter ID campaign, including May 1, the deadline for forming the statewide commitment and raising initial costs for filing the initiative, and Aug 31, the date the initiative language must be filed with the secretary of state. The secretary of state then formally approves the initiative in early October, and once that takes place, the campaign has 180 days to attain 1 million verified signatures by April 2026.

On the same conference call last week, DeMaio warned supporters that Democrats, the media, and even some Republicans are already attacking the campaign as a misuse of time and energy.

“All I had to say to them is it’s a shame your name is going down in the history books as people who are trying to keep our state controlled by the blue supermajority that has ruined it,” DeMaio warned. “We cannot have people try to split us up. We’ve got to unite. We’ve got to demand that elected officials who are Republicans do everything they can do.”