Read our profile on Milam's opponent, Secretary of State John Merrill, here.
Heather Milam said she knows her government and she attributes much of that to her Childersburg High School civics teacher. She vividly remembers voting in a mock presidential election her teacher set up in hopes of teaching the students and the community about the importance of voting.
Milam, 39, said Alabama as a whole has room for improvement in this area. That’s why she is running for Secretary of State.
“I think we need to get back to that,” Milam said. “We need to institute an importance of civic engagement and help high schoolers understand how to register to vote.”
She is pushing for automatic voter registration if elected, which is why educating high schoolers is so important to her. She also wants to implement early voting and to expand polling place locations to add polling places on college campuses.
“What we see currently is we’ve condensed our participation in democracy and elections into a 12-hour period on a work day,” Milam said. “That makes it very complicated for a lot of people to participate in elections. We need to expand voter participation, not condense it.”
The office of the Secretary of State needs the most improvement Milam found after she started and ran her own newspaper in 2011. Throughout her 7-year career at that newspaper, she learned many things about Alabama politics.
“One of the things I like to say is that you can’t un-know what you know and you can’t un-see what you’ve seen,” Miliam, 32, said. “That kind of became the place where I was existing, and I really wanted to effect change in a public sector with a newspaper.”
Now, Milam is an adjunct professor of business at the University of Montevallo and is learning about how to be an effective political candidate and leader through Emerge Alabama, a candidate training program for Democratic women in the state.
“Emerge Alabama came into Alabama and started training its first round of Democratic women to run for office [in 2017],” Milam said. “I was one of the 25 women in the first cohort. We were undergirding our desire to run for office with the knowledge and the education we wanted to be effective candidates and good public servants.”
Social media is taking over the political scene. In the months leading up to the midterm elections, many celebrities, elected officials and average citizens have taken to social media to encourage voter participation.
It can be used as an effective tool of government if done correctly, Milam said.
“I don’t have a problem with anyone having their own personal page,” Milam said. “If you are using your personal Twitter account to conduct state business, then it must maintain its openness and transparency period. Otherwise, it is a violation of our first amendment rights.”
She said she believes if an elected official is conducting any type of official business on their personal accounts, then those accounts must be open to the public, meaning they are not allowed to block anyone.
Alabama has voter ID laws that require voters to provide a photo ID when they go to vote. Milam believes Alabama needs to provide more access to photo IDs.
The current Secretary of State has implemented a mobile unit program where his office takes a mobile photo ID lab to counties throughout Alabama.
“We need to take these mobile units that are issuing free voter ids and put them into communities all over the state, more than just a couple of hours a month on a random weekday,” Milam said.
Election security is also a deep concern for Milam. She said Alabama and the federal government are in communication about election security and she hopes that line of communication remains open.
“I can only presume that they’re going to maintain an open line of communication, but I do think that we need to have faith and the secretary of state that they are utilizing the resources at their disposal to ensure the integrity of the election,” Milam said.
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Elizabeth, senior in journalism and political science, is the community editor for The Plainsman
