Mark Meadows, a former top Trump aide, has been removed from the voter rolls in North Carolina as the state investigates allegations that he committed voter fraud in the 2020 election, election officials said Wednesday.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, shown in 2020, has been removed from the voter roll in North Carolina as a voter fraud investigation continues. Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Meadows, who served two terms as a congressman from North Carolina before becoming President Trump’s White House chief of staff, has helped promote Trump’s baseless claims that widespread voter fraud delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. But his withering rhetoric about potential voter fraud has clashed with reports in recent weeks that Meadows registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a North Carolina mobile home he never stayed in.
Those reports prompted North Carolina state investigators to launch a probe last month into Meadows’ voter registration. On Monday, Macon County officials “administratively removed the voter registration of Mark Meadows … after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” North Carolina State Board of Elections spokesman Patrick Gannon said in a statement Wednesday.
News of Meadows’ removal was first reported by the Asheville Citizen-Times. Meadows’ wife, Debra, remains registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain address, according to the newspaper. A representative for Meadows declined to comment Wednesday.
Under North Carolina statute, a person who moves to and votes in another state or the District of Columbia loses their North Carolina residency.
According to a report by the New Yorker last month, Meadows filed his voter registration in September 2020, three weeks before North Carolina’s deadline for the general election, listing his residential address as a 14-by-62-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C. Neither the home nor the property with that address have belonged to him, and he has never lived there, the magazine said.
It is unclear whether Meadows has spent even one night at that address. The small mobile home belongs to a Lowe’s retail manager, who bought it last summer from a widow living in Florida. The woman, whom the New Yorker did not identify by name, told the magazine that she had no idea Meadows had listed the home as his address in his voter registration form.
If Meadows is found to have committed voter fraud, it would be at odds with his harsh criticisms of Democrats. Along with Trump and many of his allies, Meadows repeatedly warned of voter fraud leading up to the 2020 election, and he decried it repeatedly in his book “The Chief’s Chief,” which published in December.
In his memoir, Meadows lambasted Democrats’ efforts to push for increased mail-in voting access during the pandemic, and tied it to certain fraud. He spoke critically of “lowered” standards for mail-in ballots, and he suggested that officials might not even bother to check if the signatures on those ballots matched what the state had on file.
“President Trump had alerted us to the strong possibility that there would be fraud connected to these mail-in ballots, and we wanted to be on the lookout for it,” Meadows wrote. “So, elsewhere in the White House complex, we had set up an internal brain room that provided information to the campaign team, and we wanted to approach any potential challenges with the utmost seriousness.”
If any of their analysts did find fraud, he continued, Trump’s lawyers “would take legal action right away.”
In addition to the state investigation into his North Carolina voter registration, Meadows has been under scrutiny for his refusal to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress for defying the committee’s subpoenas.
Meadows remains a key figure in the panel’s investigation because he remained in proximity to Trump during the time between the election and the Capitol attack, as the president tried to overturn the results and spread false claims of voter fraud. Text messages that were sent to Meadows on Jan. 6 showed a failure by Trump to act quickly to stop the insurrection, despite real-time pleas from lawmakers, journalists and even his eldest son.
The bipartisan panel is investigating the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that tried to stop the certification of Biden’s electoral college win, a siege that resulted in five deaths and left some 140 members of law enforcement injured.
The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.
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