Former chief of staff Mark Meadows removed as North Carolina registered voter
Apr 13, 2022, 5:34 PM | Updated: Jun 13, 2022, 3:35 pm
FILE: White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows walks along the South Lawn before President Donald Trump departs from the White House on Oct. 30, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
(Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump, has been removed from North Carolina’s list of registered voters after documents showed he lived in Virginia and voted in that state’s 2021 election, officials said Wednesday.
Questions arose about Meadows last month, when North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration, which listed a home he never owned — and may never have visited — as his legal residence.
A representative for Meadows, a former congressman from the area, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meadows frequently raised the prospect of voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election, as polls showed Trump trailing Joe Biden, and in the months after Trump’s loss, to suggest Biden was not the legitimate winner. In his 2021 memoir, he repeated the baseless claims that the election was stolen.
Judges, election officials in both parties and Trump’s own attorney general has concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Experts point to isolated incidents of intentional or unintentional violations of voter laws in every election.
Under North Carolina general statutes, “If a person goes into another state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district, or into the District of Columbia, and while there exercises the right of a citizen by voting in an election, that person shall be considered to have lost residence in that State, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district from which that person removed.”
Public records indicated Meadows had been registered to vote in Virginia and North Carolina, where he listed a mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting a 2020 presidential election ballot in the state.
Meadows listed a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, as his physical address on Sept. 19, 2020, while he was serving as Trump’s chief of staff in Washington. Meadows later cast an absentee ballot for the general election by mail. Trump won the battleground state by just over 1 percentage point.
The New Yorker spoke to the former owner of the Scaly Mountain property, described as a 14-foot by 62-foot mobile home with a rusty metal roof, who indicated that Meadows does not own the home and never has. The previous owner said Meadows’ wife rented the property “for two months at some point within the past few years” but only spent one or two nights there.
Neighbors said Meadows was never present, The New Yorker reported.
The New Yorker story doesn’t identify the former owner’s name, saying she requested that her name not be used.
In announcing his removal from the voter rolls, the Macon County Board of Elections said it had received no formal challenge and was referring the matter to the SBI, the state elections board said Wednesday.
Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch had asked the attorney general’s office to handle any investigation into Meadows’ voter registration, recusing herself from the matter because Meadows contributed to her campaign for DA and appeared in political ads endorsing her.
