The Brief

Huntington Beach voters will soon decide whether they want to require people to show ID to vote in city elections.

The ID requirement is the heart of Measure A — also known as Charter Amendment Measure No. 1 — is one of three measures on the city's March 5 ballot. Measure A also asks voters if they want the city to monitor ballot drop boxes and add more in-person polling locations.

The measure is one of the first big tests of residents' feelings about the city's sharp turn to the right under the leadership of an ultra-conservative city council majority, elected in 2022.

Supporters say Measure A would restore voters' trust in the election process and ensure that only registered voters are casting ballots.

The proposal has set off alarm bells among voting rights advocates and state leaders, who point to evidence that voter ID requirements disproportionately impact low-income people and non-white voters. They say the state and county already have robust measures in place to ensure voters are who they say they are.

Local opponents also worry the ID requirement could come at a high price to taxpayers, for example, if the city has to defend it in court.

Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark and her three conservative colleagues on the city council crafted the measure and voted in October to put it on the ballot. Van Der Mark, who is Latina and says she came from a low-income, minority community, told LAist she's offended by opponents' insinuation that requiring voter ID is "racist."

"To me, it was insulting for them to say that just because we were poor, or maybe had a little more melanin, we weren't capable of getting IDs," she said.

What the ballot measure actually says

If voters approve Measure A, it would change the city's charter (like a Constitution for cities) to read that the city "may verify the eligibility of Electors by voter identification" in municipal elections starting in 2026.

Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark said her goal is to restore residents' confidence in the election system.

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The city council changed the language from "shall verify" to "may verify" while finalizing the measure for the ballot. Van Der Mark told LAist if the measure passes, the city council would then have additional discussions about how to implement it.

The ballot measure does not specify what type of ID the city might require voters to show. It also doesn't specify whether ID would be required only at polling places or also with mail-in ballots. (Van Der Mark told LAist the intention is that it would apply only to voting in person).

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, said the vague language raises questions about who might be affected by the measure, if it passes, and how vulnerable it might be to legal challenges.

"If you require a single card, like a driver's license, that's a lot more restrictive than if you require some other form of proof that you are who you say you are," Levitt said. "And I don't think this proposed charter amendment gives the voters any real sense of whether the city council is inclined to be permissive or restrictive or none of the above."

How does California verify voters?

California puts the bulk of its voter identification efforts on the registration process, Levitt explained. When registering to vote, you are asked to provide your driver's license number, state identification number, or the last four digits of your Social Security number.

You also have to sign an affidavit. Lying on a voter registration affidavit is punishable by up to three years in prison.

If, when registering to vote, you do not provide your driver's license number, state ID or social security number, you must provide additional identification in order to vote for the first time at a polling place or by mail.

The potential types of identification you can show is extensive (here's the list) and includes a photo ID issued by the military, a school, health club, insurance plan or public housing development; or an up-to-date document that includes your name and address, such as a utility bill, bank statement or government paycheck.

Elections officials — in Orange County, this is the O.C. Registrar of Voters — are also required to verify that the signatures on vote-by-mail ballots and provisional ballots match those in voter registration records.

All of these measures put together are California's way — in conjunction with federal voting law — of "trying to strike a balance between having a secure election and an accessible election," said Caltech political science professor Michael Alvarez.

Is a Voter ID requirement legal?

Measure A faced legal threats even before ballots were mailed out.

California's attorney general and the state's top election official warned Huntington Beach that requiring voter ID would violate state law. In a joint letter to Huntington Beach officials in September, before the city council's vote, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote that by requiring "a higher standard of proof than set out in the Elections Code," the proposal would likely violate the state's prohibition against "mass, indiscriminate, and groundless challenging of voters."

They said if the measure is implemented, "we stand ready to take appropriate action to ensure that voters’ rights are protected, and state election laws are enforced."

In a Sept. 28 city council meeting, Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates called the legal arguments in the letter "specious." He noted that state law grants charter cities like Huntington Beach authority over the conduct of city elections.

Then, in November, a Huntington Beach resident challenged the measure in court, seeking to keep it off the ballot. They argued that requiring voter ID violates state election law and Californians' right to vote.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Nico Dourbetas ruled that voters should be allowed to weigh in on the measure first. If voters approve it and the city begins implementation, then it may be appropriate for the court to weigh in on whether it violates the Constitution, Dourbetas ruled.

How much would Measure A cost?

Former Huntington Beach Mayor Connie Boardman, who's campaigning against Measure A, worries about the unknown cost to taxpayers of implementing a voter ID requirement — and likely getting sued over it.

"What's going to be cut to pay for this?" she said in an interview with LAist. "The council has put something on the ballot they want the voters to approve, but they can't tell us how much it's going to cost," Boardman said.

Still, some estimates have been put forth.

Putting the initiative on the Mar. 5, 2024 primary ballot is costing the city $327,428 to $391,628, according to an initial estimate that O.C. Registrar Bob Page shared with LAist.

The cost to taxpayers could skyrocket from there, especially if the registrar's office can't or won't continue to run elections for Huntington Beach, as it currently does. It's generally much cheaper to do this than for a city to hold its own election.

Page told LAist he can't comment on the matter because he is conducting the current election.

Gates, the city attorney, wrote in his analysis of Measure A for voters that it would lead to an "undetermined" increase in costs to the city.

But last year city staff made initial calculations of at least some of the costs.

They estimated it would cost at least $69,000 to train and deploy poll workers to check voter IDs.

If the city has to run its own elections rather than continue to rely on the Orange County Registrar of Voters, staff estimated it would cost an additional $1.35 million to $1.69 million for the city to hold its first stand-alone election in 2026.

That includes $664,000 to $858,000 for initial startup costs, including purchasing equipment, and $689,000 to $832,000 in recurring costs per election, according to the staff report.

In comparison, the city paid the registrar's office $303,656 in 2022 to put local races (four city council seats, the city attorney, and three city measures) on the November general election ballot.

Huntington Beach's annual budget is approximately $500 million.

Why Voter ID is so controversial

In a news release that accompanied the warning letter to Huntington Beach officials, the Secretary of State noted that voter ID requirements have historically been used to disenfranchise eligible voters, especially low-income people and people of color.

Alvarez, the Caltech professor, said unequal treatment of voters can show up in more subtle ways when voter ID is required at polling places. For example, he said, when polling places are run by neighborhood volunteers, a poll worker may not bother to ask for ID from someone they know, but require it of someone they don't recognize.

"In many cases, that stranger may be a person from a marginalized community, maybe somebody who they're not familiar with," Alvarez said. "That's an easy way where these kinds of policies can be applied in an unequal manner."

He said requiring voter ID at the polls can also snarl the voting process in other ways, "ranging from disturbances that arise when people don't want to show their ID or get turned away to, again, the possible discriminatory use of these requirements, to people forgetting and just not having the government-issued ID when they show up to vote."

Documented instances of voter fraud are extremely rare in California, according to both Alvarez and Levitt, the law professor.

A Heritage Foundation database of voter fraud turns up just 17 cases in California since 2020. Fifteen of the cases resulted in criminal convictions. One election, the 2021 city council run-off election in Compton, was overturned because of fraud. (The organization’s website notes that the fraud database is not an exhaustive list but rather “is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.“)

"What problem are they trying to solve?" Alvarez asked.

Where did this all begin?

The voter ID proposal is one of many actions that have rankled state officials and local opponents since an uber-conservative majority took control of Huntington Beach's city council in 2022.

The council has also sued the state over housing laws, banned the Pride flag from city flagpoles, restricted minors' access to books about puberty and sexuality and, most recently, passed a resolution supporting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in his fight with the Biden administration over border policy.

The three-member Democrat minority bloc on the city council has opposed all of these actions, but has been unable to stop them.

Last year, an ad hoc committee made up of Van Der Mark and fellow council members Pat Burns and Tony Strickland proposed the voter ID requirement, among other changes to the city's charter.

In a phone interview, Van Der Mark noted that other states require voter ID at the polls. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 37 states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show ID before voting in person.

"It's not a novel concept," Van Der Mark said. "Other states are already doing it. We're just asking to do it as a city."

She told LAist her impetus for supporting the voter ID rule is to restore residents' confidence in the election system.

"A lot of people are not voting because they say, 'My vote doesn't count. I keep voting and we just keep losing.' If asking for ID will restore the faith in our elections to where people are going to get out and vote, then we should do it," she said.

Further reading

• LAist's Orange County Voter Game Plan Guide: Huntington Beach Ballot Measures
• Huntington Beach election page — official ballot statement, impartial analysis, arguments for and against
• Protect HB, a group opposed to the ballot measures
• Huntington Beach’s New Conservative Council Bans Pride Flag On City Property (LAist)
• The Pride Flag Is Gone. Library Books Are Under Review. It’s A New Era Of Backlash Politics In California (CalMatters/LAist)

A few weeks ago, Taelyr Vecchione vented her growing frustration with traffic in San Diego.

"Do you remember when traffic started at, like, 5?" she said in this video posted on TikTok. Vecchione filmed herself sitting in her car, lamenting how things in her Southern California hometown have changed.

"Now," she says, "there is always traffic. Always!"

In fact, there is data to back her up on this. San Diego has seen a significant jump in traffic delays, researchers say, as congestion across the U.S. climbed to record levels in 2024.

If it seems like traffic is getting worse where you live, that's because it probably is. After dropping during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers say, congestion has equaled — and, in many places, surpassed — pre-pandemic levels. And those delays are spreading to more times of day and more days of the week.

"We are back. But the delay kind of has a different feel to it than it did before," said David Schrank, a senior research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, which has tracked congestion since the 1980s in its annual Urban Mobility Report.

For decades, Schrank says, those patterns barely budged. Then came 2020, when congestion plunged during the pandemic lockdown. Now it's back at record levels, he says, with the average American spending 63 hours per year stuck in traffic.

There are some other notable differences from past years too. The rush-hour peaks are still the worst times to drive, Schrank says, but there's more congestion at other times of day as well.

"It's spread out over more of the day, and thus it's not just a commuter issue," Schrank said in an NPR interview. "Everyone is experiencing more of that delay."

Those aren't the only changes researchers are seeing in the data. Schrank says there's more delay on weekends. Traffic on Mondays tends to be noticeably lighter than on the other weekdays, he said, while Thursday has nearly caught up with Friday as the heaviest traffic day of the week.

"There's more variability day to day than there was pre-pandemic. The day of the week matters, and the time of the day matters," Schrank said.

Trucks are causing more congestion as well, according to the Texas A&M report. While some truck traffic shifted toward off-peak hours during 2020 and 2021, the most recent data shows that truck-related delays during rush hour are climbing back toward their pre-pandemic level.

Schrank and his colleagues ranked every metropolitan area in the U.S. by hours of traffic delay. San Diego saw the largest percentage jump in hours of delay per commuter since 2019, at more than 37%. Miami, Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area saw significant jumps too.

But no city caught up to Greater Los Angeles, where the average commuter lost 137 hours to delays last year, according to the Texas A&M report.

Traffic on Interstate 210 during the morning commute in Pasadena, Calif., this month. Researchers say the average driver in Los Angeles lost 137 hours to traffic delays in 2024, the most of any U.S. city.

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That came as no great surprise to Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He warns against reading too much into the individual city rankings but says the overall findings make sense.

"Congestion moves largely in sync with broader patterns in regional economies. And so if you have the economy doing well, congestion tends to be worse. If you have a recession, it tends to be a little bit better," Manville said.

Researchers at Texas A&M also identified a few regions where congestion is down compared with before the pandemic — most notably, Washington, D.C. That could be linked to the persistence of remote work in the federal government in 2024. And it might also have something to do with regional efforts to fight congestion, including a tolling strategy known as dynamic pricing.

"If you're going to contribute to the excessive congestion during the peak and the evening rush hours perhaps, you're going to be paying more for the tolls," said Robert Puentes, a vice president and transportation expert at the Brookings Institution.

Puentes lives in Northern Virginia, which has adopted an extensive system of tolls on major highways that charge different prices at different times. And he says that this seems to help reduce congestion.

"It's something that really could be applicable in other metropolitan areas. We see places in Texas and California, in other places, that are using it. I think it has a real future in this country," Puentes said.

Another ambitious effort to fight congestion is happening in New York City, where car drivers now pay as much as $9 to enter Lower Manhattan.

That congestion pricing plan has already cut traffic in the toll zone since its launch in January. But it's still too early to say how much it's changing commuting patterns across the region.
Copyright 2025 NPR

It's one of the most anticipated events ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

On Friday, FIFA will conduct the draw for the top men's soccer tournament, taking place across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The draw — at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. — will determine which opponents all 48 teams participating in the World Cup will eventually face in the initial group stage.

The draw will be attended by the three leaders of the countries hosting the event, including President Trump, in an event that has become quite the spectacle over the years.

Here's what to know about the draw for the World Cup, with the ceremony set to kick off at 9 a.m. PT.

What is the draw for?

Next year's tournament is the biggest ever, with 48 teams set to be split among 12 groups of four.

These groups make up the first stage of the tournament, which determines which teams advance to the knockout rounds. The top two sides of each group automatically qualify, along with the eight best third-place teams.

Not all teams that will take part in the 2026 World Cup are known, though. So far, 42 countries have qualified, with the remaining six — including Italy — set to compete in playoffs next March to determine the final list of participants.

How will the teams be drawn?

Ahead of the draw, all teams have been placed in four pots, primarily based on their most recent FIFA rankings.

Pot 1 will include top-ranked teams such as Spain and Brazil, along with the three hosts. Pot 4 will include the lowest-ranked teams, including World Cup debutants Cape Verde, Curaçao and Jordan, as well as placeholders for the six teams that have yet to qualify.

Teams will be drawn randomly from each pot — but there are a few rules.

There can be only up to two European teams per group and only one team per group from each of the remaining five continental confederations under FIFA. That means, for example, that an African team such as Tunisia cannot be drawn into the same group as Ghana, even if they are in two separate pots.

In addition, in a quirk for this year's tournament, FIFA has determined that the top two-ranked teams — Spain and Argentina — will be placed in groups that would end up on opposite sides of the tournament bracket should they each win their respective groups. That ensures these two early favorites would not meet until the final.

The same rule will apply to France and England, the third- and fourth-best ranked teams according to FIFA.

When will we know where teams will play?

In another quirk, teams will not know at Friday's draw where or when they will play. The locations and kickoff times for each team across all 16 host cities will be determined on Saturday, at a separate event.

FIFA has said it wants to try to take travel times for teams in mind, while also ensuring that teams are drawn into kickoff times that are more favorable for spectators in their respective countries. For example, evening start times would likely be better for Asian sides, ensuring games are taking place when it's roughly the following day for spectators back home.

Spain is considered one of the early favorites to win the 2026 World Cup. Pictured here is star player Lamine Yamal, celebrating a goal against France in the semifinal of the UEFA Euro 2024 tournament, which Spain eventually won.

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Does this all matter?

The draw helps determine how easy — or difficult — the path to the knockout rounds will be for most teams.

Just like in any tournament, all teams would prefer to face the ones they view as weaker and avoid being placed in the "Group of Death," the moniker given to the group perceived to be the most difficult in a tournament.

"You don't want to be one of these heroes — like, 'give me the best,'" says Herculez Gomez, who played for the U.S. in the 2010 World Cup and now hosts the Men in Blazers podcast Vamos. "That's not how it works. Even the best don't want the best at the World Cup."

But World Cups are unpredictable. Strong soccer powerhouses have failed to advance past the World Cup's group stage before, including Germany in 2018 and 2022, and Spain in 2014.

That said, this year's tournament is bigger. Even finishing third in a four-team group can ensure qualification, although where each team ends up within its group will determine its path through the knockout rounds.

Which are the early favorites and the teams to watch?

Predictably, among the early favorites are recent global soccer powerhouses such as Spain, England and France, along with South American teams, such as Argentina and Brazil.

But there will be interesting storylines to watch outside the favorites, including Curaçao, which became the smallest country to qualify for the World Cup, with a population of just over 150,000 people.

And, of course, there will be enormous interest in which teams the three hosts will end up facing in their respective groups.

The U.S. men's national team, for example, is approaching the World Cup draw with some momentum after staying undefeated in the past five games. Its most recent record marks a big improvement after a rocky period under coach Mauricio Pochettino and previous coach Gregg Berhalter, which included an early exit from last year's Copa America regional tournament.

NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Despite watching one after another of his state’s tech titans head to the White House to seek President Donald Trump’s favor, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he doesn’t begrudge the industry’s rightward swing — mostly.

“It’s very situational with a lot of these guys,” he said when asked about tech businessmen going to “the other side.” “They are and they aren’t. … I don’t see it as as big a shift as perhaps others do.”

His comments at a New York Times finance summit underscored the governor’s balancing act with the tech industry, even as his relationship with its major businesses has been strained by Trump this year. Though he has excoriated law firms and universities for “selling out” to Trump administration demands this year — even threatening to pull state funding from California universities that sign certain agreements with the president — Newsom has walked a finer line when it comes to tech.

“I think it’s a little bit more, I don’t want to say the word transactional, but it’s fiduciary,” he said of tech leaders’ decisions to curry favor with Trump.

Newsom, who was San Francisco mayor in the 2000s, has long been close with tech leaders. As governor, he counts on the industry’s outsized gains to keep a massive state budget balanced. As a possible 2028 presidential contender, he could find Silicon Valley’s deep-pocketed donors helpful.

The relationship has made Newsom a reliable politician in the industry’s corner as lawmakers in his own party increasingly push for regulations on social media and its effects on children, data centers’ use of environmental resources and artificial intelligence’s proliferation into workplaces, adolescent relationships and daily life.

While Newsom has signed some of those bills, particularly ones in which advocates negotiated with tech companies, he’s also vetoed several out of concern that overregulating a nascent industry would drive it out of state. And he’s vehemently opposing a proposed wealth tax that would undoubtedly touch tech executives.

Tech titans cozy up to Trump

That’s been the case this year despite Silicon Valley’s increasing coziness with Trump, whom Newsom has criticized for threatening industries with tariffs to extract concessions and demanding loyalty from private business executives. The relationship has affected California in a number of ways, from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s aggressive pursuit of federal firings and cost-cuttings earlier this year to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s suggestion that Trump send the National Guard to San Francisco, precipitating a nervous few days in October as the president moved to start immigration raids there. Benioff later walked back his statements and Trump said he relented after talking with him and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Peter Leroe-Muñoz, a senior vice president at the industry group Bay Area Council, praised Newsom for nevertheless understanding “the value of the innovation our member companies produce.”

“While the governor may not always agree with innovation companies and how they choose to operate or conduct themselves, at the end of the day the governor recognizes that we all have a stake in the success of California and so not cutting off ties or undermining those industry players is in the long term success of the Golden State,” Leroe-Muñoz said last month.

Still, Newsom offered some criticism of the industry’s relationship with Trump on Wednesday, calling it “self-dealing” that the president’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks, along with many other investors and chipmakers, have reportedly been in line to profit from Trump’s AI directives.

“There needs to be levels of ethics that are demanded of these leaders,” he said. “That entire ecosystem has benefited from it. California has benefited from it. But I do not think it’s healthy for capitalism.”

And he called Apple CEO Tim Cook’s ability to strike a deal with Trump to get tariff exemptions for critical parts of the iPhone supply chain “by definition, crony capitalism.”

“How about the farmers and ranchers in California, how about all the small businesses that can’t pick up the phone and get an exemption on their tariffs?” Newsom said. “It breaks my heart.”

But he acknowledged Cook was serving his shareholders: “Do I begrudge that? Yes. Do I begrudge him? Not as much.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

From demogorgons clasping onto a white truck to a decibel reader device, much of the props in Stranger Things were designed with the intention to feel vintage and authentic.

Much of that is thanks to Shane Dzicek, a special effects designer based out of Burbank. Beyond Stranger Things, Dzicek worked on the Faztalker device in the most recent Five Nights at Freddy’s film, the jets on Top Gun: Maverick and the Roomba-esque vacuum cleaner shoes in Hocus Pocus 2.

LAist’s Julia Paskin talked with Dzicek about working on this latest season of Stranger Things and what it’s like to design special effects in the age of AI.

The process of designing the props in “Stranger Things”

Julia Paskin: What can you share on this date in terms of anything that you worked on in the new season?

Shane Dzicek:  One of the things that I was excited to work on was a device that Steve actually has in the squawk van. It's this great device that counts from zero to 99.

 I put in an alpha numerical display. Back in the ‘80s, they might have used different tech…And the original one weighed like 35, 40 pounds. So I hollowed the ones that we remade from scratch. So that way, Steve [Harrington] could have this thing with him and not have to worry about the weight.

A screengrab from the "Stranger Things" season 5 trailer. Special effects designer Shane Dzicek created the decibel system device to the right of Joe Keery's character Steve Harrington.

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Julia Paskin: In the trailer, there's the truck with demogorgons on top of it. And you did some work on that. Can you tell us about that as well?

Shane Dzicek:  Murray [Bauman] was driving the truck. [The actors inside] need to be able to act. They need to have cameras right there, so you can't always have this all strapped on a big truck or on a process trailer moving down the road. So we built rigs that we can move the trucks around [and] be able to do any type of heavy riding, if there's big bumps they gotta go over, if you gotta move and flip the truck over any of that type.

A screengrab from the trailer for "Stranger Things" Season 5. Special effects designer Shane Dzicek rigged the truck to withstand heavy riding.

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The impact of AI on the SFX industry

Two years ago, actors and writers in Hollywood went on strike, demanding protections from AI in TV and film writing. Last year, those same fears creeped into labor negotiations between the Animation Guild and studios and streaming companies, with the Guild calling generative AI a top concern.

But when it comes to special effects, Dzicek is optimistic about his field withstanding AI’s threats to job security.

Julia Paskin:  Are you dealing with the same kind of AI anxiety that other industries are fearful of, including myself?

Shane Dzicek: [AI] is a powerful tool. I'll probably end up seeing directors and producers and creative people that might be using it as references, being like: "Hey, I AI generated a thing now. I need you to make this come to life and be physical and practical." So I don't see AI necessarily taking that practical part of making this a real thing. That takes a lot of just ingenuity and years of education on how to fabricate and build things and bring all these elements together to create a working prop.

The other thing is you gotta train AI on the knowledge that we have. And [this] kind of knowledge is all handed by word of mouth. It's not written down anywhere. So good luck trying to protect that. Good luck trying to get the information out of all of us.

These excerpts have been condensed and edited for clarity. Watch the full interview below.