Will this California surf town approve crackdowns on voter ID and Pride flags?

Early election results suggest voters in Huntington Beach, California – the wealthy, majority-white surf town south of Los Angeles – may approve ballot measures to require voter ID in local elections, and to amend the city charter to ensure that Pride flags cannot be flown on city property.

California’s attorney general warned last year that the voter ID measure “conflicts with state law and would only serve to suppress voter participation without providing any discernible local benefit” and that the city risked state enforcement action if it moved forward with the policy.

But for some in Huntington Beach, deliberately flouting state law appears to be a feature, not a bug.

“A lot of this is taking Huntington Beach back to how it was,” the mayor, Gracey Van Der Mark, told NBC News in a recent interview. “A lot of cities are afraid to push back because they don’t want to be the target of Sacramento. We’re not afraid.”

Nicknamed “Angrytown, USA”, Huntington Beach made headlines for huge anti-lockdown protests early in the coronavirus pandemic, and later proclaimed itself a “No Vaccine and No Mask Mandate” city. The city council previously voted against flying Pride flags at city hall, amid suggestions that LGBTQ+ rights were “divisive”.

Last year, the city, in Orange county, sparked a state lawsuit by refusing to comply with affordable housing development rules, with the mayor at the time saying that state policy was designed “to urbanize quiet, private property-owning communities”. (Census data shows the current population of Huntington Beach is only 1% Black.) The California governor, Gavin Newsom, has accused the city of being a “poster child for nimbyism” and pledged state officials would crack down on localities that