Mark ‘Big Lie’ Meadows removed from voter roll in North Carolina amid voter fraud investigation

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Welp, I guess it’s official: Former Trump lackey Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls. That means he can’t pretend to live in a mobile home in Scaly Mountain in Macon County, North Carolina, in order to vote there while actually living in Virginia—where he also apparently registered to vote.

Melanie Thibault, Macon County Board of Elections director, told the Asheville Citizen Times Tuesday that she consulted with the North Carolina Board of Elections staff after discovering that Meadows was registered in North Carolina and Virginia. The board removed him from their voter rolls.

“What I found was that he was also registered in the state of Virginia. And he voted in a 2021 election. The last election he voted in Macon County was in 2020,” Thibault said.

Meadows was removed in accordance with General Statute 163-57, which states:

“If a person goes into another state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district, or into the District of Columbia, and while there G.S. 163-57 Page 2 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.”

As first reported by The New Yorker in September 2020, about three weeks before North Carolina’s voter registration deadline for the general election, Meadows—a devout Stop the Stealer—claimed to be living in a 14-foot-by-62-foot mobile home in North Carolina, where he never actually lived. But he voted absentee using that address in the 2020 general election. Meadows, a former Asheville resident and Western North Carolina congressman, was actually living in Virginia at that time.

In March, an investigation into Meadows’ possible voter fraud was launched by the State Bureau of Investigation.

“The allegations, in this case, involve potential crimes committed by a government official,” Macon County District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch wrote in a letter to the attorney general’s office on March 14.

Nazneen Ahmed, a spokesperson for North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office, told CNBC at the time that “we have agreed to [Welch’s] request” to take responsibility for the investigation.

“We have requested that the Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Sections investigate alongside the State Board of Elections,” Ahmed said. “At the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review the findings.”

As we’ve reported in the past, it remains to be seen what if any penalty will come to Meadows. But when it comes to the same thing happening to people of color, the outcome is quite clear.

In February, Pamela Moses, a Black woman, was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. And in 2019, Lanisha Diresha Bratcher, another Black woman, was charged with a felony for voter fraud after she tried to vote while on probation.

Posted in Independent News