Mark Meadows is still registered to vote in South Carolina and Virginia, officials say
Donald Trump’s former chief of staff was removed from voter rolls in North Carolina earlier this month
Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to Donald Trump who was removed from North Carolina voter rolls earlier this month, is still a registered voter in two other states, according to officials.
Chris Whitmire, a spokesperson for the South Carolina elections commission, said the former Republican congressman and his wife registered as voters in the state in March.
“That’s when he became active,” Whitmire said, noting that neither Meadows had yet cast a vote in the state. “From our perspective, it just looks like any new South Carolina voter.”
The South Carolina registration was first reported by the Washington Post, which noted that Meadows had been a registered voter simultaneously in three states – the Carolinas and Virginia – until North Carolina removed him from its rolls earlier this month. Meadows remains a registered Virginia voter, the paper reported.
Mark and Debra Meadows bought a home on Lake Keowee for $1.6m in July, according to records for the property, which was listed on their South Carolina voter registration records.
The former North Carolina congressman appeared in South Carolina earlier this week with members of the state legislature’s newly formed Freedom Caucus, an offshoot of a conservative group Meadows helped found in the US House.
A representative for Meadows declined to comment on the South Carolina voter registration.
Last month, the office of the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein, asked the state bureau of investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration in that state, which listed a home he never owned and may never have visited as his legal residence.
Public records indicated Meadows had been registered to vote in Virginia and North Carolina, where he listed a Scaly Mountain mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting an absentee 2020 presidential election ballot in the state.
Trump, for whom Meadows was chief of staff at the time, won the battleground state by just over one percentage point.
Public records indicate Meadows registered to vote in Alexandria, Virginia, about a year after he registered in Scaly Mountain and just weeks before Virginia’s high-profile governor’s election last fall.
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.
Judges, election officials in both parties and Trump’s own attorney general have concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Experts point to isolated incidents of intentional or unintentional violations of voter laws in every election.
Through the Electronic Registration Information Center, a consortium through which states exchange data about voter registration, Whitmire also said officials periodically pull voter lists and remove those who have more recently registered in a new state.
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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com