Religious-right activist Rachel Hamm is running for secretary of state in California as a Republican because she claims Jesus appeared in her closet and told her to do so. Claiming that she has been designated by God “to expose lies, to speak truth, and to establish My Kingdom every single place that you step your foot,” Hamm says she began her campaign because she “would rather be dead than live in a communist country.”
On Wednesday, Hamm was interviewed by Craig Deluz of the California Republican Assembly, a conservative activist group that has endorsed her campaign. During the interview, Hamm announced that if elected, she intends to use her position as secretary of state to make it harder for people to vote.
“My views are a little bit controversial when it comes to voter registration,” Hamm said. “Everyone is wanting to make it as easy as possible [to register to vote]. … I see it the exact opposite. I want to make it hard. I want it to be something that people have to choose and re-choose and have to prove that they’re a citizen and all that.”
“I think we should clean the slate completely and have people have to re-register every eight years or maybe even every 12 years,” she continued. “You have to re-register, you have to prove that you still want to vote, that you’re still alive, and that you still want to vote, that you still live in the place where you’re saying you live. That’s what I would like to do with voter registration.”
“There is a law—the National Voter Registration Act of 1984—that is really problematic, [that] really makes it difficult to get people off the voter rolls once they’re on,” Hamm added. “It needs to be overhauled. That needs to be changed. That’s something I would advocate to the legislature to make happen because right now it’s very hard to get people off, and I want to change that. I want it to be a privilege to vote. I want you to have to actually have to work to sign up, not have it be that there’s this auto-enroll and every single person is getting a ballot and all that. I don’t like any of that.”
All of this, Hamm said, is aimed at making sure that “people who are not educated” on the issues are prevented from voting.
“We do want people who are actually looking into what they’re voting on, the people that they are voting on, the legislation,” she said. “They really need to be educated, and when we do the system that we’re doing now, it causes people who are not educated on what’s going on—and they don’t even maybe care enough to look into it—and then they’re voting on things.”
