Mark Meadows, who served as chief of staff under former President Donald Trump — and who has repeatedly spread lies about nonexistent widespread voter fraud — was registered to vote in three different states up until last week.
According to reporting from The Washington Post, Meadows was registered to vote in Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina until last week, when North Carolina officials decided to remove him from the voter rolls. Meadows was on all three states’ voter rolls at the same time for a period of at least three weeks.
The decision to remove Meadows’s registration status from Macon County, North Carolina, was made after news reports in March indicated that he was registered to vote in the county despite living at an out-of-state residence. Meadows voted using the address in North Carolina in the 2020 election cycle, although the property’s owner said Meadows had never visited it.
As of Friday, Meadows is still registered in Virginia and in South Carolina; last year, he claimed that he was currently living in South Carolina.
In response to Trump’s loss to now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Meadows promulgated false allegations of election fraud to explain Trump’s defeat. Since leaving the White House, Meadows has served as a senior partner for the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization that claims to promote “election integrity” efforts.
The institute has repeatedly suggested that voters registered in multiple states are an indicator of election vulnerabilities, with the potential to disenfranchise other voters’ legal votes.
In reality, fraud is not committed when a person is registered to vote in multiple places — the onus is on the state, not the individual, to remove people from voting rolls when they move. Fraud is only committed when a person attempts to vote multiple times in the same election cycle at different addresses, or tries to vote using an address where they don’t actually live.
If Meadows voted in a statewide election using a registration address that wasn’t his true residence, his actions could possibly constitute fraud. As a result of reporting on Meadows’s multiple voter registration addresses, he is currently being investigated by the State Bureau of Investigation, at the request of the North Carolina Attorney General’s office.
Meadows’s actions in the months after the 2020 presidential election could also land him in legal hot water, as he frequently pressured the Department of Justice to investigate the presidential race, citing false and debunked claims of fraud. Meadows was also reportedly involved in the scheme to upend the counting of votes within the Electoral College to help Trump overturn the legitimate election results.
It’s possible that, in the near future, Meadows may face contempt of Congress charges for his refusal to adhere to a subpoena from the January 6 congressional committee.
