Anyone who still thinks Donald Trump was “joking” when he suggested delaying the presidential election this week might want to check out what Stephen Miller had to say about the issue of mail-in voting on Fox & Friends Friday morning.
The senior policy adviser began the interview by praising his boss for bringing “the whole nation’s attention to the catastrophic notion of universal mail-in ballots.” But when Miller tried to explain what is so “catastrophic” about the vote-by-mail system, he immediately resorted to lies.
“Here’s a shocking thing for your audience to consider,” Miller said. “Nobody who mails in a ballot has their identity confirmed. Nobody checks to see if they’re even a U.S. citizen. Think about that. Any foreign national—talk about foreign election interference—can mail in a ballot, and nobody even verifies if they’re a citizen of the United States of America. Now, this would be happening on a scale of potentially millions of people.”
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And yet even Fox News, in its own write-up of the interview, had to acknowledge that this scary notion presented by Miller was fundamentally false.
Calling the risk of ballot fraud “reportedly rare,” Fox cited a paper from the Brennan Center for Justice called “Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth” that found “infinitesimal” incident rates between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. “Moreover, proponents of mail-in voting argue that the process would be subject to several degrees of verification,” Julia Musto wrote in Fox’s article, “much like absentee ballots.”
Trump himself has said he supports absentee balloting, which he uses to vote in Florida from Washington, D.C., while simultaneously calling mail-in voting “rigged.”
Of course, none of the three Fox & Friends hosts pushed back on Miller’s false claims, instead quickly pivoting to John Lewis’ funeral so that their guest had an opportunity to attack former President Barack Obama’s eulogy as “shockingly political” and “totally disconnected from reality.”
Later, co-host Pete Hegseth returned to the issue of supposed voter fraud, asking, “What can be done at the White House to pressure states to actually do validated, in-person voting as opposed to allowing secretaries of states to say, 'Hey, we’re going to mail this one in?’”
“Well, one of the things that we need to do, first of all, is raise awareness, so that citizens in every state can put pressure on their local leaders and their governors to fight universal balloting,” Miller replied. “That’s a critical issue. Obviously, the Department of Justice has a responsibility to look at all issues relating to voter fraud in this country.”
“But you want to talk about voter suppression? You want to talk about denying people their franchise? That’s what universal mail-in ballots are all about,” he continued.
Speaking directly to the fears of the Fox News audience, Miller added, “Universal mail-in ballots are an attempt to dilute the vote of your viewers. It’s an attempt to dilute the vote of Americans who want to have their identities verified, by allowing for massive, endemic fraud. That is scandalous.”
