PJ Media’s Catherine Salgado went to California’s online voter registration portal and confirmed it herself. The identification section explicitly provides an option to register without a driver’s license, a state ID, or a Social Security number — and notes only that new voters “may have to show a form of identification or proof of residency the first time they vote, if a driver license or SSN was not provided when registering.”
May have to. Not will have to. May. And only if poll workers feel like asking.
Here’s what that means in practice. Anyone — including noncitizens, including illegal aliens, including foreign nationals of any description — can register to vote in California by checking a box on a form. No ID. No Social Security number. Nothing connecting you to any verified identity. Then on Election Day, you may or may not be asked to show something, depending on the individual poll worker’s judgment.
California currently provides an option to register to vote while simply checking boxes that say you do not have an ID or Social Security number pic.twitter.com/s0Zvt5o5NF
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) August 29, 2026
This is not a theoretical vulnerability that a determined fraudster might eventually figure out. This is a feature that California has built into its public-facing voter registration system, available to anyone with a computer, operating at all times including with 64 days until the November midterms.
And this is the state that has been fighting every federal effort to verify its voter rolls. The state whose attorney general is in court challenging USPS mail ballot tracking. The state where U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli just announced the first of what he expects to be many arrests — a Honduran national who registered without citizenship and voted illegally. The state where the U.S. attorney said directly: “States like California do not screen voter registration applications for citizenship. Every non-citizen registered to vote dilutes a lawful citizen’s vote. We need to audit California’s dirty voter rolls.”
Then consider that California’s already laughably broad acceptable ID list — for voters who do provide something — includes health club cards, student IDs, bank statements, discount cards, and drug prescriptions. Most of those are accessible to illegal aliens. The no-ID checkbox exists specifically because even that broad list can be inconvenient for someone without legal status.
This is deliberate. California Democrats know what their voter registration form says. They wrote it, they maintain it, they have actively resisted every federal and state effort to require verification. And California has also spent years battling in court to prevent federal authorities from accessing the state’s voter rolls to find out how many people exploited this system.
A Honduran national was arrested in Winnetka on Friday for doing exactly what the California voter registration form’s checkbox enables. Essayli said it’s the first of many.
It had better be. Because a state that puts a “no ID required” option in its voter registration form has made a choice — and that choice has consequences for every legitimate California voter whose ballot is being canceled out by someone who checked a box.
If there were ever a reason for the federal government to completely gut California’s system of voting, now is the time. You can’t have fair elections for federal office with illegal aliens voting.
