State investigators in North Carolina are probing Mark Meadows over his voter registration, after news organizations reported that the former White House chief of staff registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he has never lived in.
“Local district attorney Ashley Welch has referred this matter to the Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Section, and we have agreed to her request,” Nazneen Ahmed, press secretary for the North Carolina Department of Justice, said in a statement. “We have asked the SBI to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings.”
Meadows, 62, represented North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District from 2013 to 2020. He was former president Donald Trump’s chief of staff from March 2020 until Trump left office in January 2021.
Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Meadows, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a report by the New Yorker earlier this month, Meadows filed his voter registration in September 2020, three weeks before North Carolina’s deadline for the general election, listing his residential address as a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C.
Neither the home nor the property with that address have belonged to him, and he has never lived there, the magazine said.
It is unclear whether Meadows has spent even one night at that address. The small mobile home belongs to a Lowe’s retail manager, who bought it last summer from a widow living in Florida. The woman, whom the New Yorker did not identify by name, told the magazine that she had no idea Meadows had listed the home as his address in his voter registration form.
After the 2020 election, Meadows promoted Trump’s false claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
It is illegal to provide false information on a voter registration, and while Americans can have multiple residences, they can have only one official domicile, which is tied to their voter registration. To register to vote in North Carolina, a citizen must have lived in the county where they are registering and have resided there for at least 30 days before the date of the election, according to the state’s board of elections.
Experts have scrutinized Meadows’s actions as potential voter fraud. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker examined the details of the case and wrote that it was “jarring to see such fishy behavior by someone who decried” voter fraud.
