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Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff, removed as registered voter in North Carolina

Then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows speaks with reporters outside the White House on Oct. 26, 2020.
Patrick Semansky
/
AP
Then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows speaks with reporters outside the White House on Oct. 26, 2020.

Story updated at 4:08 p.m.

An elections board in a North Carolina county has removed Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump, from its list of registered voters after documents showed he lived in Virginia and voted in the 2021 election in that state.

Questions arose about Mark Meadows last month, when North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration in Macon County in western North Carolina.

In announcing his removal, the Macon County Board of Elections said it has received no formal challenge and is referring the matter to the SBI, the state Board of Elections said Wednesday.

A representative for Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch asked the attorney general’s office in March to handle any probe into Meadows’ voter registration and said she would recuse herself from the matter. She noted that Meadows, a former congressman from the area, contributed to her campaign for DA and appeared in political ads endorsing her.

Public records indicated Meadows is registered to vote in two states, including North Carolina, where he listed a mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting a ballot in that state in the 2020 presidential election.


An elections board in a North Carolina county has removed Mark Meadows — a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump — from its list of registered voters after documents showed he lived in Virginia and voted in the 2021 election in that state.

Questions arose about Meadows in March, when North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration in Macon County in western North Carolina.

In announcing his removal, the Macon County Board of Elections said it has received no formal challenge and is referring the matter to the SBI, the state Board of Elections said Wednesday.

A representative for Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch asked the attorney general’s office in March to handle any probe into Meadows’ voter registration and said she would recuse herself from the matter. She noted that Meadows, a former congressman from the area, contributed to her campaign for DA and appeared in political ads endorsing her.

Public records indicated Meadows is registered to vote in two states, including North Carolina, where he listed a mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting a ballot in that state in the 2020 presidential election. Records also show that Meadows registered to vote in Alexandria, Virginia, about one year after he registered in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, and just weeks before Virginia’s high-profile governor’s election last fall.

Meadows listed a mobile home in Scaly Mountain as his physical address on Sept. 19, 2020, while he was serving as Trump’s chief of staff in Washington, D.C. Scaly Mountain is just north of the Georgia-North Carolina border and about 90 miles west of Asheville.

Meadows later cast an absentee ballot for the general election by mail. Trump won North Carolina by just more than 1 percentage point.

The New Yorker, which first reported the questions about Meadows' voter registration, interviewed the current and former owner of the Scaly Mountain property. The previous owner said Meadows’ wife rented the property “for two months at some point within the past few years” but only spent one or two nights there. Neighbors told The New Yorker that Meadows was never present.

Meadows frequently raised the prospect of voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election, as polls showed Trump trailing Joe Biden, and in the months following Trump’s loss to suggest Biden was not the legitimate winner. He repeated those baseless claims that the election was stolen in his 2021 memoir.

Prior to becoming Trump's chief of staff in March 2020, Meadows, had been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 11th District which covers the western part of the state.

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