Records show that Mr. Meadows cast an absentee ballot from the address of a remote mobile home, but reports have cast doubt on whether he lived there.
North Carolina officials said on Thursday that they planned to investigate whether Mark Meadows, who as former President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff helped amplify false claims of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, cast a legal vote in that year’s presidential race.
The North Carolina Department of Justice has asked the State Bureau of Investigation to examine whether Mr. Meadows broke the law when he registered to vote, and voted from, a remote mobile home where he did not live, said Nazneen Ahmed, a spokeswoman for Josh Stein, the state attorney general, who is a Democrat.
“We have asked the S.B.I. to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings,” Ms. Ahmed said.
Law enforcement officials in Macon County, a rural community in the mountains of western North Carolina, first became aware of questions surrounding Mr. Meadows’s voter registration last week after The New Yorker revealed that he had voted from a home where he did not live, the local district attorney, Ashley Welch, wrote in a letter to the state Justice Department.
“Until being contacted by the media, I was unaware of any allegations of voter fraud surrounding Mark Meadows,” she wrote.
Mr. Meadows did not respond to messages Thursday evening. He has not yet offered any public explanation for his 2020 voter registration.
The letter and the state investigation were first reported on Thursday by WRAL, a television station in Raleigh, N.C.
North Carolina voter registration records show that Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote at a three-bedroom mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., six weeks before the 2020 election. He voted absentee by mail from that address, according to the state records.
The former owner of the Scaly Mountain home told The New Yorker that she did not believe Mr. Meadows had ever visited the residence. A neighbor told the magazine Ms. Meadows had stayed there only one or two nights.
Before he registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain home, Mr. Meadows had voted in 2018 from a home in Transylvania County, N.C., and in 2016 from Asheville, N.C., according to North Carolina records.
In 2021, he also registered to vote in Virginia, where he and his wife own a condominium in the Washington suburbs, ahead of that state’s contentious election for governor.
In her letter, Ms. Welch asked state officials to investigate Mr. Meadows because she had a conflict of interest. Mr. Meadows, Ms. Welch said, contributed to her 2014 campaign and appeared in political advertisements for her. At the time, Mr. Meadows was a member of Congress representing eastern North Carolina.
“It is in the best interest of justice and the best interest of the people of North Carolina that the Attorney General’s office handles the prosecution of this case,” Ms. Welch wrote.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
