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More than 500,000 Californians demand voting overhaul, back ‘straightforward’ ID law
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FIRST ON FOX: More than 500,000 California voters have signed a petition to amend the state’s constitution to enforce voter ID laws for all elections, leaders of a coalition called Californians for Voter ID told Fox News Digital.
“We had a dog that voted in the last couple elections in Costa Mesa,” Republican California state Sen. Tony Strickland told Fox News Digital in a Wednesday phone interview about California’s persistent voter integrity concerns. “We don’t clean up our voter rolls. There are so many times where people move, college kids go out of state, or people move and they don’t clean up the voter rolls. And we mail out to everybody, and so you have a lot of live ballots with ballot harvesting.”
“Our initiative will now clean up the voter rolls throughout the state,” he added.
Strickland, who represents a district that includes portions of Orange and Los Angeles counties along the Southern California coast, is helping lead the charge to collect more than one million petition signatures from California voters in order to force the issue on the ballot for the 2026 election. The signature collection kicked off Oct. 1, meaning the group collected support from more than half-a-million voters in a one-month span.
CALIFORNIA REPUBLICANS LAUNCH VOTER ID BALLOT PUSH, NEED 875K SIGNATURES BY DEADLINE
More than 500,000 California voters have signed a petition to amend the state’s constitution to enforce voter ID laws for all elections. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Californians for Voter ID initiative specifically would amend California’s constitution and require voters to present government-issued IDs before casting a ballot in all future elections in the state.
California voters would be required to present a government-issued ID before voting in-person, or provide the last four-digits of a government ID if voting by mail. Election officials, under the initiative, would be required to verify a voter’s citizenship to ensure only legal residents register to vote or receive ballots.
Democrats historically have opposed voter ID laws over claims it disenfranchises minority voters, while conservatives argue it will ensure only legal residents are able to cast ballots and further bolster voter integrity. Thirty-six states have voter ID laws already on the books, though such laws vary and have some exceptions.
Californians for Voter ID leaders, however, say the issue is not a partisan one, but an effort to protect democracy for all Americans.
The lead strategist for the effort, Ryan Erwin, told Fox News Digital that recent polling shows 70% of Californians across the political spectrum support elections requiring IDs to vote, while underscoring the outpouring of support that has led to more than 500,000 signatures already secured.
“We are on pace to qualify for the ballot faster than any measure in the history of California,” Erwin said. “Voter ID is a commonsense way to build trust in the election process by requiring election officials to use government data to verify citizenship and voter eligibility, while also requiring identification for every vote counted.”
OBAMA ENDORSES NEWSOM CALIFORNIA REDISTRICTING PROP 50
“Californians of all political stripes are eager to improve trust in the system by eliminating abuse and errors while protecting every eligible vote,” he continued. “The volunteer effort is overperforming, we have signatures from all 58 counties, and are on pace to qualify well ahead of our goal.”
The group needs a total of 874,641 in order to land the initiative on the 2026 ballot in the Golden State, but is aiming to secure 1.2 million signatures to ensure the support is certified by county officials who will go through the data before it is permitted to land on the ballot. Organizers have until March to secure the needed signatures before potentially getting on the ballot — with Strickland reporting he’s confident they will get the needed support.
State Sen. Tony Strickland, a Republican from California, is confident they will get the needed support to get the voting initiative on the ballot. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“You have to be a citizen in order to register to vote,” Strickland said of the nuts and bolts of the amendment itself, calling it “very straightforward.”
“You have seven forms of documentation, you get to choose what form of documentation that you use in terms of the last four digits of whatever the documentation is,” he said. “When you go to the polls, you show your ID, and if you mail in your ballot, you show that proof of the documentation of the last four digits that you choose.”
“The other part of this initiative is we have a mandatory audit (to) all 58 counties of their election rules after every election,” he added.
Strickland is no stranger to voter ID efforts in the deep blue state, including championing a voter ID ballot initiative in Huntington Beach, California, in 2024, when he served on the city council. Voters approved the amendment forcing voters to show their ID when casting ballots in local elections, but the California Court of Appeals struck down the law in November.
If the statewide voter ID effort is approved by voters on the ballot in 2026, local lawmakers will be compelled to comply with voter ID laws set forth in the initiative.
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Strickland said the massive amount of support the initiative already has received is on par with a 1978 initiative, Proposition 13, “when the legislature was out of touch with the people, the people rose up” and passed the ballot measure that fundamentally changed how property taxes were assessed and limited in California.
Strickland also compared it to the successful recall of former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 — California’s first and only successful recall of a governor. Strickland was the first legislator to endorse Davis’ recall as energy and economic woes rocked the state.
If the California voter ID effort is approved by voters on the ballot in 2026, local lawmakers will be compelled to comply with voter ID laws set forth in the initiative. (Gary Leonard/Getty Images)
“Speaking around the state of California, I would equate what’s going on today with voter ID and voter integrity to those two movements in California,” he said.
The California state senator also praised California Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio and his group, Reform California, for their ongoing efforts championing voter ID laws in the state, describing DeMaio’s work as “relentless.” Strickland and DeMaio are joint authors of the voter ID push and have teamed up to meet with voters at various events to rally support, including a recent event in Santa Barbara, where the people couldn’t get through the door because it was so packed, he said.
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California’s voting laws have fallen under the Trump administration’s critical eye just this week, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posting to X Tuesday that the Golden State has the “WORST laws for securing elections in the entire nation.”
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that California is facing a “very serious legal and criminal review” over claims the state’s special election to redraw congressional district lines was mired in corruption. Voters passed the measure to redistrict on Tuesday, with Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrating
“California doesn’t require voters to show photo ID before casting a ballot – despite nearly 90% of Americans supporting photo ID laws,” Leavitt posted in a lengthy message detailing issues she sees with the state’s election process. “California uses universal mail-in-balloting, which we know is extremely vulnerable to fraud and abuse. In the 2024 election alone, California mailed nearly 10 million mail-in ballots that were never returned.”
The Heritage Foundation keeps a database compiling cases of known voter fraud — namely cases that have led to criminal convictions — and found California has at least 68 cases of voter fraud since 2001. The examples include individuals who fraudulently used absentee ballots for duplicate votes, non-resident voting and fraudulent voter registration.
The database shows other states, such as Illinois and Texas, have more instances of confirmed voting fraud, at more than 100 cases each, while other states such as Nebraska have seen only at least three instances of confirmed voter fraud in recent years.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt takes a question from a reporter during the daily briefing at the White House on Nov. 4, 2025. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Newsom has countered the claims, arguing California’s elections are fair and secure while slamming Trump over his remarks.
“He also announced today, right when polls were opening, that this election was rigged. Of course, those are familiar words. It’s exactly what Donald Trump said after Jan. 6, that day of love, where he tried to light democracy on fire, he tried to wreck this country,” Newsom said Tuesday after polling showed the state passed Proposition 50 to redistrict.
“I hope it’s dawning on people the sobriety of this moment,” Newsom continued. “What’s at stake. Tonight, as I said, is an extraordinary moment for our party, but again, it’s an extraordinary moment affirming those principles. Our Founding Fathers did not live and die to see the kind of vandalism to this republic and our democracy that Donald Trump is trying to perpetuate.”
A ballot initiative championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to redistrict California’s congressional lines passed in a special election Nov. 4, 2025. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
For Strickland, he championed that the voter ID initiative will move ahead with the help of grassroots efforts and a little “homework.”
“I’m going to speak to two groups today, and I give them homework assignments, just saying, ‘Please take those packets. We’re planning to go get 50 signatures, go get 100.’ And I use a sports analogy. I say, in baseball, if you hit two times out of every 10, you’re barely making the major leagues. You’re probably going down the minor leagues. But if you get three hits every 10, you’re an all-star. And I’m asking everybody to get that extra hit in life,” Strickland said.
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The dilapidated fishing vessel from which “Rose of Nevada” takes its name disappeared into the sea off the coast of Cornwall, England, in 1993, bringing with it two members of a shorthanded crew. A young fisherman who had called out sick that day later died by suicide; some speculate because of survivor’s guilt. There’s a lot of speculation about that old boat. It was the kind of tragedy from which a tight-knit community never really recovers, and this quaint Cornish fishing village has since been stricken by decades of poverty and rot. Now, 33 years later, the Rose has mysteriously returned. It just showed up, ship-shape and empty, sitting there in the harbor one misty Monday morning. All she needs now is another crew.
How and why the boat returned is not for me to say, nor are such matters of much concern to writer-director Mark Jenkin. A time travel adventure with the cadence of a ghost story, “Rose of Nevada” haunts the viewer like the sound of a faint, distant horn on a foggy night. George MacKay stars as Nick, a loving husband and doting dad who has been out of work for some time now. He’s also a bit of a dummy, caving in their apartment’s roof while trying to patch a leak during a rainstorm. Nick finds himself crewing the Rose out of financial necessity — he’s literally trying to put a roof over his family’s heads — while Callum Turner’s gruff drifter Liam comes aboard seemingly because he’s got nothing better to do.
Any other movie would probably try to explain exactly how these boys return from their maiden voyage with a robust catch to find themselves transported back to 1993. They discover their little town thriving and keep running into younger, happier versions of characters we’ve met in the miserable present. Everyone seems to know who Nick and Liam are, but they’re calling them different names. It’s as if the two have somehow stepped into the shoes of those doomed crewmembers from 33 years ago, brought back here by the Rose either to fix history or repeat it.
Part of what makes the movie so mesmerizing is Jenkin’s artisanal approach. He shoots on an ancient, hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera — a model slightly less advanced than what my film school class was using three decades ago. Jenkin leans into the grainy imperfections of the image, keeping in all the scratches and light leaks that professional labs and technicians typically scrub out. It’s impossible to capture synchronized sound with this equipment, so background noises and the necessarily sparse dialogue are added later in post-production, lending an eerie, uncanny quality to the proceedings.
The set of self-imposed limitations creates its own aesthetic. Jenkin’s hand-cranked camera won’t run for more than 28 seconds at a time, forcing him to tell the story in a series of punchy, discrete images. Instead of wide establishing shots, he favors tight closeups made even more claustrophobic by 16mm’s boxy 1.33 aspect ratio. Our brains assemble the scenes almost like a mental jigsaw puzzle, getting a full sense of the boat without ever getting a complete look at it. Same goes for the town. It’s amazing how many gaps your mind fills in for you when prompted properly.
Jenkin takes a similar approach to the screenplay, allowing rhyming images and visual cues to provide most of the exposition. I went back and watched the movie a second time to try and understand how I always felt like I knew what was happening, even though I couldn’t possibly explain what was going on. The rhythms of the picture feel almost like a dream, obeying their own strict logic that locks in perfectly at the end. Jenkin’s previous picture, the cryptic Cornish island folk tale “Enys Men,” tried similar tactics, but with annoying, off-putting results. Two of the reasons this film connects so much better are the appealing lead performances by MacKay and Turner, a couple of genuine movie stars with whom we are happy to get lost at sea.
MacKay made no impression at all in the insipid, Oscar-winning World War I gimmick film “1917,” but has since revealed himself to be one of our most adventurous young actors. He was electrifying as a bi-curious, homophobic hooligan in the 2024 Boston Underground Film Festival favorite “Femme,” and nailed multiple roles from swoon-worthy stud to psychopathic incel stalker in Bertrand Bonello’s brain-melting “The Beast.” There’s a performative aspect when most actors play dumb, a theatricality that reminds the audience they’re actually smarter than the character. As our stranded family man Nick, MacKay offers no such condescension. He’s a dim bulb with a big heart in an unfathomable situation; his eyes sometimes touchingly, hilariously blank. So much is already beyond Nick, and then all this happens.
Most readers probably know Turner as Mr. Dua Lipa. For those who have trouble keeping track of their cute British boys, he’s the jug-eared, scruffy one who isn’t Josh O’Connor. I’ve never understood the hubbub about this guy, but he won me over here. It’s tough to recall a character in a science-fiction story quite like Liam, who, when experiencing something as foundation-shattering as time travel, figures, “Sure, why not?” and rolls with it. MacKay has some hilarious reaction shots to his screen partner’s blithe acceptance of their new reality. Though I suppose it helps that in this alternate 1993 timeline, Liam winds up with a beautiful wife and daughter, while Nick just gets stuck with overbearing parents.
I’ve been turning over the movie’s ending in my mind for a couple of weeks. “Rose of Nevada” comes to a conclusion both hopeful and bittersweet, depending on how you want to read it. This is an odd, beguiling film that doesn’t look or sound like anything else you’ll see in theaters this year. The raggedly beautiful imagery is a feast of rust and decay, the film itself dinged up like it’s followed the boat here from a distant, mysterious time.
“Rose of Nevada” opens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Friday, July 10.
A wild rat in New Mexico tested positive for the plague after four dogs were diagnosed with the troubling disease earlier this year, according to authorities.
A homeowner discovered the plague-ridden rodent dead on a private property in Santa Fe County and submitted it for testing, according to the New Mexico Health Department.
It is the first confirmed wild animal in Santa Fe County to test positive for the illness caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria in 2026, the health department said.
The case follows four other confirmed plague cases in dogs this year — including three pooches in Santa Fe County and one in Bernalillo County.
“While this is an animal case of plague, it’s important to remember humans can get plague from flea bites or direct contact with infected animals, including rodents, wildlife and even pets,” Dr. Chad Smelser, deputy state epidemiologist for NMDOH, said in a statement.
“Pets can be infected with plague if they eat an infected animal or are bitten by infected fleas,” Smelser said.
Although human cases of the plague are rare, roughly half of all cases in the US each year occur in New Mexico, according to the health department.
The disease can be life-threatening without proper treatment, but if it’s caught early, it can be treated with antibiotics, officials added.
Symptoms in humans include sudden high fever, chills, headache, nausea, and swollen lymph nodes.
Infected pets similarly suffer from fever, low energy, loss of appetite, and swollen lymph nodes, experts added.
The New Mexico Health Department cautioned residents to take several steps to prevent themselves and their contracting the plague — including cleaning up areas near homes such as woodpiles, brush piles, junk and abandoned vehicles, where rodents could live.
Pet food and water should be kept away from where rodents and wildlife can get to them, and people should stay away from sick or dead rodents and rabbits.
Pets should use veterinarian-approved flea control products and be promptly taken to a veterinarian if they are sick.
Last year, a man in Arizona and a domestic cat in Colorado died of the bubonic plague.
A 43-year-old man from Valencia County in New Mexico was also hospitalized with the disease in 2025.
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Montana Lottery Powerball, Lotto America results for July 8, 2026
