“I oppose any effort to restrict Californians’ right to vote,” said Xavier Becerra. This comes after opponent Steve Hilton is demanding voter ID.
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Barely a week after California’s primary election, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra has fielded a number of questions about voting in the state under intense scrutiny from President Donald Trump.
Becerra, Democrat and the first candidate expected to advance He will face Republican and former Fox News host Steve Hilton in the November general election.
As of 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9, results released by the California Secretary of State show that the former Secretary of Health and Human Services remains in the lead with 27.9 percent, followed by Hilton at 25 percent.
Hilton invited Becerra to join his campaign. Support Voter ID in a clip shared on your Facebook page The voter ID measure, which gathered enough signatures to qualify to vote in November earlier this year, would amend the California Constitution to require voters to present a government-issued ID at the polls or the last four digits of their government-issued ID number when voting by mail, according to an official summary.
“With voter ID, you don’t have to have endless checks of signatures and verifications. All of that stuff they say takes so long,” Hilton said in a clip shared by KNX News on June 9. “Voter ID allows us to do this quickly, confidently and securely.”
Organizations such as the League of Women Voters of California and the ACLU of Northern California oppose voter ID measures in California. The former would create “new ways to reject eligible ballots and falsely target voters through error-prone citizenship tests,” it said.
Reporters asked Becerra about his position on the matter and Hilton’s invitation. In response, he asked Hilton not to join people like the president but to participate “here,” referring to Hilton’s June 9 visit to businesses at the Mercado La Paloma food hall in Los Angeles, and in his response pointed to claims the president had recently made about the California election.
Trump has made a series of accusations about the election and voting, alleging without evidence that Democrats were “trying to steal” the gubernatorial primary and calling the state’s election results “a sham.”
He went on to say that “what we want” is for every vote to be counted accurately and “we encourage everyone to vote on Election Day.” He said it would be “great” if people could vote sooner, but what’s more important is that people vote.
“I’m against voter suppression,” Becerra said. “I oppose anything that would restrict Californians’ right to vote.”
Asked if he would change anything legally to speed up California’s vote-counting process, Becerra said he was “suspicious” of “infrastructure improvements to increase ballot processing capacity.”
“I think most county registrars would say, ‘Sure, give us more money so we can hire more people and have more equipment and process ballots faster,'” Becerra said. “But again, a lot of times people vote towards the end and there’s a huge amount of votes at the last minute, so the voting gets stuck.”
“If we could get everyone to vote sooner so that we don’t end up with a big backlog, maybe all the counties would be able to process their votes more quickly,” he said.
Paris Barraza is a reporter covering Los Angeles and Southern California for the USA TODAY Network. please contact her pbarraza@usatodayco.com.
