California officials, experts and advocates debate voter identification at state hearing

Secretary of State Shirley Weber told a California Senate committee that the state verifies voters’ identities at multiple points and that in-person impersonation is rare. "There is a myth that we do not have voter ID," Weber said, adding that verification begins at registration, when applicants must provide a California driver’s license or state ID, or the last four digits of a Social Security number, and that VoteCal assigns unique identifiers when those are unavailable.

Weber said California checks driver’s license and state ID numbers against Department of Motor Vehicles records and matches Social Security digits to Social Security Administration records. She told the committee that the state updates death records weekly with data from the California Department of Public Health and receives felon data from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation at least weekly.

“Out of 26,000,000 possible voters, we had 12 in the last 5 years that were fraud,” Weber said, citing a Heritage Foundation tally; she described that number as "virtually insignificant" given tens of millions of ballots cast in recent elections.

Santa Cruz County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Trisha Weber described county procedures for registration,…