voter

Supporters of a billionaire tax said Sunday that they had gathered nearly twice as many signatures as necessary to qualify the controversial proposal for the November ballot.

Opponents of the proposal argue that it already has driven wealthy Californians — crucial to funding the state’s volatile budget — to other parts of the nation. Advocates, however, say the proposed tax is critical to compensate for federal healthcare funding cuts that will harm the state’s most vulnerable residents.

“Most Californians and most billionaires recognize how reasonable and necessary this proposal is — both to keep emergency rooms open and to save California businesses from closing,” said Suzanne Jimenez, the chief of staff of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the chief proponent of the effort. “A very small group of the most controversial billionaires on the planet tried to stop” this effort, she added, but when “our growing coalition files these signatures, David will have won the first round against Goliath.”

The union, which represents more than 120,000 healthcare workers, patients and consumers, launched the effort to counter massive healthcare funding cuts that President Trump signed last year. The California Budget & Policy Center estimated that as many as 3.4 million Californians could lose Medi-Cal coverage, rural hospitals could shutter, and other healthcare services would be slashed unless new funding was found.

The proposal would impose a one-time tax of up to 5% on taxpayers and trusts with assets valued at more than $1 billion, with some exclusions, such as property. The levy could be paid over five years. Ninety percent of the revenue would fund healthcare programs, and the remaining funds would be spent on food assistance and education programs. The proposal would cost the state’s richest residents about $100 billion if a majority of voters support it.

Supporters need to submit the signatures of nearly 875,000 registered voters to county elections officials by June 24. They say they have gathered nearly 1.6 million signatures.

Opponents of the measure, which has divided liberals — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) supports it while Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes it — said the proposal would destroy California’s economy and budget, while doing nothing to address the state’s underlying financial issues.

“This wealth tax would have a devastating impact on our economy, state budget, and the cost of living for all Californians,” said Rob Lapsley, president of the bipartisan California Business Roundtable. “The measure doesn’t do anything to reduce the state’s $35-billion-plus budget deficit and does nothing to address the decade of overspending that led to the structural deficit. In fact, because the state relies so heavily on high-income-earner tax revenue, this measure could lead to reduced budget revenue in the long term as highly mobile wealthy individuals leave the state to avoid this new tax.”

He also argued that the proposal could result in higher taxes for all Californians.

“This is an everyone tax that is called a billionaire tax,” Lapsley said, “and we will ensure Californians understand the truth on the devastating consequences this initiative will have.”

SACRAMENTO — A ballot measure that would require Californians to show identification every time they vote in person, or use a special pin number when submitting mail-in ballots, has qualified for the November ballot, elections officials announced Friday.

The measure also would require election officials to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens, aligning with a Republican-led push for new restrictions on voters in the wake of President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that undocumented immigrants are swaying elections by voting illegally.

Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio from San Diego has been pushing the measure for several years, while Trump and Republicans also are seeking a similar initiative at the federal level.

If passed, the California ballot measure would require a voter to present government-issued identification, such as a state driver’s license, every time they vote. Voters mailing ballots would be required to write a four-digit number, essentially a pin number, on their ballots matching the one generated when they registered to vote.

The pin would come from ID such as a driver’s license, or could be generated from the county. The vast majority of Californians mail in their ballots in elections.

Under the measure, election officials also must ensure that registered voters are U.S. citizens by using information from government records, which could include information in the federal Social Security Administration database, and maintain accurate voter registration lists.

DeMaio said the measure is different than a federal proposal, known as the SAVE Act, which stalled out in the U.S. Senate this week.

DeMaio said the state ballot measure “does not do away with mail in ballots, because voters of all political backgrounds like the convenience of mail in ballots. So we want to keep that convenience.”

The ballot measure needs a simple majority to pass.

Under current law, Californians are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail. They are required to provide identification when registering to vote, and must swear under penalty of perjury, a felony, that they are eligible to vote and a U.S. citizen.

Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, told the Times that her group is committed to fighting the measure, arguing it would make it harder for people in the state to vote.

She said that people may forget to use a pin on their mail-in ballot, leading to their vote being disqualified. Similar changes in Texas, she said, led to a rise in rejected ballots due to technical errors.

“It doesn’t really weed out illegal voting,” which doesn’t actually exist, she said, “but it does cause more ballots to be incorrectly flagged and ultimately rejected.”

ACLU of Northern and Southern California, Common Cause, Disability Rights California also oppose the measure.

DeMaio filed for the ballot initiative in 2021 and 2023, but did not move forward with the signature collection process in order to fine-tune the ballot language.

He said his ballot measure wasn’t focused primarily about making sure that undocumented people don’t vote.

“That’s one element of concern that we’ve heard from some groups, but it really is making sure that, number one, we properly maintain our voter rolls,” he said.

Democrats on Wednesday celebrated an election win in Virginia that could put them slightly ahead in the national redistricting competition that President Trump triggered in an attempt to preserve his party’s House majority in this year’s midterms, but it will not be the final round.

Now that it’s been approved by voters, the new Virginia map will have to clear additional legal hurdles. On Wednesday, the state attorney general’s office said it would immediately appeal a ruling earlier in the day from a judge in rural southern Virginia who ordered that the results of Tuesday’s vote not be certified.

Ultimately, the Virginia Supreme Court will decide whether Democratic lawmakers violated procedural rules when they referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot authorizing the new U.S. House districts that could help Democrats win as many as four additional seats in the state. If so, that could invalidate the map voters narrowly approved Tuesday.

What happens next in Florida also will matter.

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature is to meet in a special session next week that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis called in part to draw a new map to expand the party’s congressional majority there. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to issue an opinion by the end of June in a Louisiana case that could overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and lead to redrawn political maps across the South, though almost all of those could not happen until 2028.

After voters passed the Virginia amendment, Democrats could tentatively claim that they netted 10 seats nationally from the mid-decade redistricting, compared with the nine that Republicans claim. Even if things swing again in the GOP’s favor, the net result of Trump’s campaign would be at best an incremental increase in the number of GOP-leaning House seats at a time when his approval rating is dropping and Republican anxiety over losing control of Congress in November is rising.

“We have successfully blunted Trump’s attempt to completely hijack the midterms,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Many Republicans agreed.

“The GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you’re going to pick a fight, at least win it,” Ari Fleischer, who was a spokesman for President George W. Bush, posted on the social media site X after the Virginia vote. “All this was foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.”

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, argued that it is too soon to declare one party a victor.

“It’s an ongoing process with many legal challenges pending, and it’s far too early for sweeping statements on the final outcome,” he said.

Trump on Wednesday tried to undermine the Virginia result by leveling groundless accusations of fraud similar to ones he made after losing the 2020 presidential election. He called the Virginia vote “RIGGED” and “Crooked” in a post on his social media site and added, “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

Redistricting spread from Texas to other states

Redistricting is typically done every 10 years after each census, unless ordered by a court. But last summer, Trump pushed a redrawing in Texas, prodding the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to add up to five winnable House seats for his party. Trump then began pressuring other Republican-run states to follow. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have since created more GOP-leaning seats in addition to Texas.

Democrats began to fight back, even though they were more constrained because several Democratic-controlled states had maps drawn by independent commissions rather than lawmakers and governors.

To counter Texas, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, pushed the Democratic-controlled Legislature to place a redistricting initiative on last fall’s ballot. After voters overwhelmingly approved it, the measure will replace a commission-approved map with one that could gain Democrats five seats.

Democrats reclaimed the Legislature and governor’s office in November in Virginia and swiftly moved to replicate California’s move with an even more aggressive redistricting plan. It replaces a congressional map imposed by a court after the last census that had resulted in a 6-5 edge for Democrats with one that could allow Democrats to win as many as 10 seats.

“We are not going to let anyone tilt the system without a response,” state Senate President L. Louise Lucas said at a news conference Wednesday.

Courts could still have a say on redistricting

In Washington, U.S. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York warned Florida Republicans, who have been openly nervous about redrawing their district boundaries and potentially spreading their core voters too thin before an election that appears to be trending against them.

“Our message to Florida Republicans right now is, ‘F around and find out,’” Jeffries said.

House Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the super political action committee aligned with House Democrats, has spent nearly $60 million to push back against Republicans’ redistricting efforts. Some $40 million of that was on the Virginia campaign.

Another obstacle in Florida is an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment that was approved by state voters in 2010. It is likely that any new Florida map would trigger significant litigation, although six of the state Supreme Court’s seven justices were appointed by Republicans.

Nicholas Stephanopolous, a Harvard law professor, said a challenge for DeSantis is that the Florida amendment forbids drawing lines for purely partisan purposes, so he has to find some other excuse for revising the map. “Even with that sort of acquiescent state supreme court, I don’t think it’s a done deal,” Stephanopolous said.

The Virginia move comes with its own legal issues. Republicans have challenged the process that Democrats used to place the measure on the ballot and the state Supreme Court opted to wait for the vote before even scheduling arguments in the case. It is unclear when a ruling could come.

Wednesday’s ruling stopping certification came from a separate case that Republicans filed with the same lower court judge, whose initial ruling against the initiative was put on hold by the state supreme court.

“The ballot box was never the final word here,” Terry Kilgore, the Virginia House Republican leader, said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote. “Serious legal questions remain about both the wording of this referendum and the process used to put it before voters.”

The biggest legal wild card is held by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its conservative majority could throw out a requirement under the Voting Rights Act that in areas with a large minority population, mapmakers draw districts that are more favorable to the election of minority candidates.

That provision has led to the creation of several majority-minority congressional seats, especially in the South. Without it, Republicans in conservative states could shrink the number of U.S. House seats winnable by Democrats even further.

But it’s unlikely that any state other than Louisiana, which brought the lawsuit the high court will rule on, would be able to adjust its congressional lines in time for November even if the court eliminates that provision, known as Section Two. That’s because the November election is already officially underway in most states and candidate filing deadlines — and, in some cases, primary elections — have already passed.

Riccardi and Lieb write for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Leah Askarinam in Washington contributed to this report.