California’s Identity Problem
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed Senate Bill 1174, which prohibits local governments from enacting or enforcing identification requirements for voting. The measure was authored by state Sen. David Min, Irvine Democrat, now running for Congress in California’s 47th district. Min’s own background raises questions about the legality and morality of bills making voter identification illegal.
Min earned a JD at Harvard, served as an enforcement attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and taught law at the UC Irvine School of Law for eight years. Min is a member of the bar in New York State and the District of Columbia, and in February 2022 he passed the California bar exam. That exam has stringent requirements, including a moral character test.
Those taking the test must include fingerprints from a Live Scan Service form completed within the last 90 days. So, to practice law in California, Harvard law alum Dave Min submitted to a mandatory identification check and moral fitness test. Contrast the bar exam with the dynamics of voting.
An election makes voters public officials for one day. Voters can decide who becomes president and vice president of the United States, a matter of some importance. Voters can elect members of Congress who will make the laws, and approve or reject various ballot measures that have direct bearing on taxpayers. Min wants voters to be exempt from identification measures, and bans local governments from imposing them. That stands at odds from some of Min’s own materials.
For example, contributors to Min’s congressional campaign must certify, “I am a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted permanent resident (i.e., green card holder).” As the Harvard law alum must know, by law U.S. citizenship is a requirement for voting, yet the senator and candidate wants to bar identification of voters.
Min’s legislation contends that “voter identification laws place the onus on the voter to prove their identity and right to vote, even after voters have taken the necessary steps to prove their identity and right to vote through the voter registration process.” As the Orange County Democrat should know, this is not true in the Golden State.
California automatically registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license at the DMV. State officials won’t say how many illegals violated the law by voting in 2016, 2018, 2020, or in the 2021 recall election for Gavin Newsom, who signed Min’s bill.
State attorney general Rob Bonta had already filed a lawsuit against Huntington Beach, the Orange County city that sought to require voter identification. Bonta contends that ID requirements could make it harder for poor, non-white, young, elderly and disabled voters to cast ballots. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants have room for reasonable doubt.
All Californians are required to produce identification to board airplanes, apply for a home loan, purchase a firearm, purchase whiskey, become an attorney, and so forth. Californians might think a Harvard law alum, SEC enforcement attorney and law professor would know that. Californians also have to wonder about their attorney general, a Yale law alum
As a member of the California Assembly, Bonta was the prime mover of Assembly Bill 2088, the California Wealth Tax, which if passed would have slapped a 0.4 percent tax on the portion of a taxpayer’s net worth that exceeded $30 million. AB-2088 would also have taxed former Californians 90 percent of their in-state levy in the first year after they left the state and 80 percent in the second year, phasing out over a decade.
A Yale law alum should know that a state can’t tax non-residents, and that non-citizens can’t vote. In light of Bonta, Min, and Newsom, legitimate citizens and legal immigrants might imagine this scenario.
Congress is in session and an unelected imposter poses as a House member and votes to approve an increase in taxes and government spending. That would not be acceptable, but illegal voters essentially pull off the same trick. Anybody who endorses non-citizen voting, regardless of party affiliation or ideological profile, forfeits any claim to support the rule of law, the basis of a free and democratic society.
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.
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