In summary
Voters in Huntington Beach are passing measures for voter IDs and against gay pride flags to make the city a conservative bastion. But the state could take the city to court.
Huntington Beach voters are poised to adopt a pair of measures pushed by local leaders seeking to remake the Orange County city into a bastion of resistance against liberal California — likely setting up a showdown with the state over voting rights that could further galvanize conservatives.
With tens of thousands of ballots from the March election counted as of Wednesday evening, a charter amendment that would allow the city to require voter identification in municipal elections led 54% to 46%. Another to restrict which flags can fly on city property, effectively banning displays of the rainbow LGBTQ+ Pride flag, was winning with more than 58% of the vote.
Both proposals emerged from a new conservative majority on the city council, elected in 2022, which has spent the past year on a contentious campaign to reverse any past progressive governance that they argue is out of step with the community’s values. The crusade has thrust Huntington Beach into some of the country’s fiercest cultural battles, including over vaccine mandates, transgender athletes and library books.
“This is the direction that the community has been wanting to go,” said Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, a Republican who led the effort to establish a committee to monitor library books for sexual content. “If they didn’t want this, they wouldn’t have voted and supported this.”
The election will not be the final word, however.
Last fall, Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, both Democrats, warned Huntington Beach officials that the voter ID proposal — which would take effect in 2026, and also grant the city authority to add more in-person voting locations and monitor ballot drop-boxes — conflicted with state law. They contend that requiring voter ID violates a provision in the election code that prohibits “mass, indiscriminate, and groundless challenging of voters solely for the purpose of preventing voters from voting.”
Despite a lawsuit from Huntington Beach resident Mark Bixby aiming to block the measure, a judge ruled that its legality could only be considered if it were to pass and allowed it onto the March ballot.
With the proposal seemingly headed toward victory, Bixby said Wednesday that he was exploring his options for reviving his lawsuit. He called voter ID — an increasingly popular requirement in Republican states — unnecessary “theatrics” in an election system that is already secure.
“It’s designed to discourage minorities from voting by erecting additional hurdles,” Bixby said. “This is wrong. This is plainly wrong.”
He added that the conservative council majority used the measure to motivate their political supporters, without consideration for how much it would cost the city to run its own elections, which are currently managed by the county. Huntington Beach officials have occasionally expressed a desire for their protests against liberal California policies to serve as an inspiration for other communities that do not feel represented by the state.
Meanwhile, state Sen. Dave Min, an Irvine Democrat who represents Huntington Beach in the Legislature and is running for Congress, recently introduced Senate Bill 1174, which would prevent local governments from implementing voter ID requirements, a direct challenge to the city. A spokesperson said Min was in transit Wednesday and unavailable for an interview about the bill, which awaits its first committee hearing.
A spokesperson for Bonta said the attorney general’s office is monitoring the election outcome and referred back to his 2023 letter in which he cautioned Huntington Beach that he would “take action to ensure that any monitoring system implemented by the City does not interfere with the right to vote or otherwise violate state law.”
Van Der Mark acknowledged that Huntington Beach may be on a collision course with the state, which she accused of waging “lawfare” against the city. But she said the council majority has simply been responding to priorities they heard from residents on the campaign trail, including a desire for “election integrity.”
“At the end of the day, we can’t bow down to Sacramento just because they’re constantly threatening and bullying us,” she said. “We know the community better than Sacramento.”
Voters’ embrace of the flag proposal was perhaps an even more bitter defeat for opponents.
One of the new council majority’s first major steps last year after taking office was to adopt a policy allowing only flags for the United States, California, Orange County, Huntington Beach and the military to fly on city property. They argued that the community should unify behind symbols that represent everyone equally and that the Pride flag, which was displayed at city hall for the first time in 2021, promoted divisive identity politics.
The ballot measure would require a unanimous vote of the city council to raise any additional flags on city property — effectively banning the rainbow flag for the foreseeable future. Critics said it would send a message that Huntington Beach, a beachside community with a large tourism industry, was not a welcoming place for LGBTQ+ people.
Dan Kalmick, a member of the city council’s liberal minority who voted against placing the proposals on the ballot, said he worried that residents did not fully understand the significance of adding them to the city’s charter.
“Overall, I think voters in Huntington Beach aren’t paying attention. That’s the biggest problem,” Kalmick said. “And when people aren’t paying attention, you get stuff like this.”
Opponents, including many past city officials, launched a campaign last fall against the charter amendments. Connie Boardman, a former mayor who helped organize the group known as Protect Huntington Beach, said she was disappointed by the outcome of the election but not surprised given the low turnout and more conservative electorate typical of a primary.
Though she worried that the council majority would take the results as a signal to push even further in their political challenges to the state, Boardman said she was also encouraged that Protect Huntington Beach kickstarted its own movement to push back against what she sees as conservative overreach in the city.
“The alternative was to do nothing, and that wasn’t acceptable,” she said. “The pendulum swings back and forth. And it’s swung pretty far to the right now, but it will swing back.”