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April 13, 2022

Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Is Removed From North Carolina Voter Rolls

The move comes amid a state investigation into whether he committed voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Patrick Semansky/AP

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Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been removed from the North Carolina voter rolls amid an ongoing investigation to determine whether he committed voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“The Macon County Board of Elections administratively removed the voter registration of Mark Meadows … after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Board of Elections, told us in a statement. 

“No formal challenge has been received by the Macon County Board of Elections,” he added. 

Macon County Board of Elections Director Melanie Thibault told the Asheville Citizen-Times that she had removed Meadows on April 11. Under North Carolina law, voters lose their state residence if they vote in another state’s election. As Meadows cast a vote in a 2021 Virginia election, he is considered to have lost his North Carolina residence, from which he cast an absentee ballot in the 2020 presidential election.

However, it’s also unclear whether Meadows ever actually lived in that residence and whether his 2020 vote was legitimate.

Earlier this year, at the behest of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, the State Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into Meadows after the New Yorker alleged that he had registered to vote in North Carolina with a residence where he may not have lived. 

About a month after Meadows had railed against voter fraud in a CNN interview, he and his wife Debra listed a 14-by-62-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina on their voter registration forms. Under North Carolina law, people are required to have lived in the county where they’re registering for at least 30 days before the date of the election. However, according to the property’s former owner, Debra Meadows had only stayed at the Scaly Mountain residence one or two nights, and her husband had never stayed there at all. 

Nevertheless, Meadows continued to push Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and routinely criticized mail-in voting as uniquely susceptible to fraud. He is not the only Trump official who has been accused of voter fraud of late.

We tried to reach out to Meadows through his lawyer but didn’t hear back.

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