(Daily Signal)—As Congress struggles to pass the SAVE America Act, voters in states across the nation will decide this November on election procedures such as photo ID requirements, citizenship verification, and other election security matters.
Two states feature ballot initiatives with both voter ID requirements and calls for some form of citizenship verification and voter list maintenance. California, the largest state in the nation, has Proposition 39. The battleground state of Arizona has Proposition 144.
Also, voters in the swing states of Nevada, North Carolina, and the one-time battleground of Ohio will decide on voter ID in November. Voters in solidly red Oklahoma will consider adopting a voter ID requirement in an Aug. 25 election.
Citizen-initiated voter ID ballot measures are pending in Colorado and Michigan.
This week in California, Attorney General Rob Bonta changed the language of a voter ID ballot measure.
The language submitted by supporters stated, “Establishes additional voter identification and citizenship verification requirements.” The attorney general’s office altered the language to read, “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.”
“If California passes voter ID, it would be a huge win for three reasons. First, getting this initiative on the ballot in the first place shows that Californians are fed up with the election chaos forced on them year after year by far-left politicians who only seem interested in making a fundamentally broken system even worse,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the Daily Signal.
“Second, if this measure passes despite the blatant attempt by California’s attorney general to rig the ballot language and mislead the public into voting it down, it would prove just how commonsense voter ID is,” Snead said. “And third, a victory on this measure would finally bring the most basic protections to California’s elections—safeguards California politicians have actually tried to outlaw.”
A Bonta spokesperson defended the language change.
“When a measure qualifies for the ballot, the Attorney General’s office is required to issue a ballot title and summary and a condensed ballot title and summary,” Bonta’s spokesperson told the Daily Signal in an email.
The spokesperson added, “It is not uncommon for the ballot title and summary to change from the circulating version—and this year, all nine voter-proposed initiatives had changes. Our office properly exercised its discretion to provide further clarity to voters about Prop. 39’s chief purpose and points for the ballot stage.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently determined that as many as 190,832 noncitizens were registered to vote in California.
Another six states will decide on ballot measures related to citizenship requirements for voting. These states are Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Meanwhile, in Arizona, a proposed constitutional amendment states that only citizens may register to vote.
Municipalities and counties in California, Maryland, and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia, allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. This type of measure would prevent that local option.
Voters have approved both state voter ID and citizenship requirements in recent years.
From 2018 to 2025, voters have approved 15 state measures providing that only citizens could vote. None of the measures failed, according to Ballotpedia.
“Citizenship verification has never lost at the ballot,” Ryan Byrne, Ballotpedia’s Ballots Team managing editor, told the Daily Signal. “I believe the lowest vote total it gained was in Kentucky, with 62%. The highest was in South Carolina with over 80%.”
Voter ID laws—despite widespread support in most polls—have been less fortunate at the polls, as three out of 12 measures between 2004 and 2024 were defeated.
Voters in Minnesota, Arizona, and Maine defeated the ballot measures, Byrne said. However, he added, this typically occurred when the measures added something beyond just ID. Notably, the Maine proposal in 2025 also had ballot drop box restrictions.
He noted that historically, progressives have pushed citizen-initiated ballot initiatives for election procedures, but this year, about 70% of the ballot initiatives on election administration were introduced by conservatives.
States are weighing other election-related matters as well. Virginia voters will consider a measure to automatically restore voting rights to felons upon release from prison.
Massachusetts voters will consider a top-two primary system to replace the party primary system. This would be similar to California’s process, where the top two vote-getters in a primary—regardless of party affiliation—advance to the general election. The Bay State also has a measure to allow Election Day voter registration.
Alaskans are also considering repealing their controversial ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank their top four preferred candidates. If no candidate gets 50% of the vote in the first round of counting, one candidate is eliminated, and counting continues with the voter’s second or third option.
California—in addition to its voter ID measure—is also considering measures to allow taxpayer-funded financing of state campaigns.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.