00:00With just a few days to go before Election Day 2026 on November 3rd, polls are all over the place
00:06about Proposition 39, the California Voter ID Initiative. One recent poll by the LA Times and
00:12the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies suggests that Proposition 39 is not doing too
00:17well. 57% of likely voters in that poll said they would vote no on Prop 39. And that makes
00:24sense if
00:24you think of this as a partisan issue, even though Democrats like Republicans believe that
00:29there should be some requirement for ID at some stage in the process, once Democratic voters learn
00:34that Republicans really want voter ID to pass, they tend to oppose it. On the other hand, there's
00:40another poll from the San Diego Union-Tribune with SurveyUSA that suggests that Proposition 39 has a
00:46chance. 49% of likely voters in that poll said they would vote for Proposition 39, and only 42%
00:52said
00:53they would vote against it. Who knows what the real poll is or what the real result will be?
00:59One thing we've learned from watching recent elections in foreign countries like Brazil and
01:03Israel is that the polls don't always tell us exactly what's going to happen. And the exit polls
01:08on the day of the election do not guarantee what the results will be. If polls could vote, then
01:14Bolsonaro would have won in Brazil and Netanyahu would have lost in Israel. Of course, the opposite
01:19happened in both of those cases. So we have to wait and see what the result really is. Republicans
01:24really want voter ID to pass in California because they believe there's a lot of fraud and they want
01:29to protect the integrity of the ballot. Democrats want voter ID to fail in California because they
01:35believe that voter ID suppresses the vote, especially of minority voters. There's not a lot of data to
01:41prove that, and there's not a lot of data on voter fraud either, at least not as a widespread phenomenon.
01:45So both parties, in a sense, approach this question with their own ideas and myths. But regardless,
01:51the result of the voter ID initiative, Proposition 39, could set the stage for similar initiatives in
01:58other states and could change politics nationwide.
