Stephen Miller’s podcaster wife resorted to making some truly bizarre arguments for why Congress should pass a new law being feverishly pushed by President Donald Trump that could disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of the midterm elections.
This week the Senate is debating the SAVE America Act, which would put onerous new requirements on voters and county election officials by requiring voters to appear in person and present proof of citizenship, with additional burdens placed on women who changed their last names after getting married.
The bill’s critics—including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board—say that with millions of Americans lacking ready access to the necessary documents, the problems created by the bill far outweigh the scope of the issue that it claims to solve.
Miller tried to counter that point on Friday with some tinfoil hat logic.
“The reality is there’s mass amounts of cheating in our elections,” Miller told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “Just because there’s an engineered lack of data does not mean there isn’t data to the contrary.”
In fact, there isn’t just a “lack of data” of noncitizens voting; illegal voting is quantifiably rare.
For example, the Save America Act would require states to run their voter rolls through a citizenship verification tool created by the Department of Homeland Security.
Many states already use that system, which returned just 0.04 percent of voter verification cases as noncitizens last year, the Bipartisan Policy Center reported this month. Of those, 25 percent turned out to be false flags in some jurisdictions, meaning the number is even smaller.
Similarly, when Utah performed a citizenship review last year of its entire 2 million-person voter registration list, it found just one confirmed case of a noncitizen registering to vote, and zero cases of noncitizen voting.
Miller, 34, also had a head-scratching reason why it was okay for the SAVE Act to require married women to provide additional documentation, such as a marriage certificate or passport, to prove their citizenship, pointing to her pregnancy with husband Stephen Miller, 40.
Miller is pregnant with the couple’s fourth child.
“They are saying it is sexism if I needed to get a new ID in order to vote,” she said. “But you need an ID to have a baby. I’m seven months pregnant, and I know I need an ID to go prove that I can have a baby in this country. So why is it so difficult to present an ID to go vote? It isn’t.”
Photo IDs are already required in 36 states, but the latest version of the SAVE Act imposes even stricter ID requirements by prohibiting student IDs and many tribal IDs.
With his approval rating slipping to record lows over voters’ concerns about the economy, war in Iran, and the administration’s hardline immigration tactics, Trump has been demanding that Senate Republicans nuke the filibuster in order to pass the legislation, which has already cleared the House.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota opened debate on the bill this week in order to force Democrats to defend their position.
But so far, he’s said he doesn’t have enough votes to eliminate the longstanding rule requiring two-thirds of senators to agree before calling a vote.
