Mark Meadows May Have Voted Illegally Using Address Where He Reportedly Never Lived

Donald Trump's former chief of staff registered to vote using the address of a mobile home in North Carolina.
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After relentless and baseless GOP complaints about Democrats voting illegally, it’s high-profile Republican Mark Meadows who may have broken the law by registering to vote with an address where his landlord said he never spent a single night, The New Yorker reported.

Meadows, Donald Trump’s fourth White House chief of staff — and a key proponent of Trump’s stolen election lie — listed a mobile home address when he registered to vote in North Carolina in 2020, according to The New Yorker. (He sold his home in the state months earlier, when he gave up his congressional seat to work in the White House. He and his wife, Debbie, also have a condo in Washington’s Virginia suburbs, according to The New Yorker.)

Meadows’ voter registration listed as his residence a 14-by-62-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain, which his paperwork claimed he was to move into the following day, the magazine noted.

“Meadows does not own this property and never has,” The New Yorker reported. Nor did he stay there, according to the trailer’s former owner, who described the place as a summer rental. “He did not come. He’s never spent a night in there,” she said.

Debbie Meadows, spent “one or two nights” there, and the couple’s adult children sometimes stayed, according to the former landlord.

The closest neighbor to the mobile home, a Trump supporter, confirmed that Debbie Meadows stayed there briefly.

Last year, Mark and Debbie Meadows purchased a $1.6 million lakefront home in South Carolina. The New Yorker speculated that Meadows claimed North Carolina residency because he was contemplating a run for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Richard Burr. He finally opted against running.

The current owner of the mobile home, who purchased it last year, told The New Yorker it was “really weird” Meadows would list the address as his residence. He said he heard the Meadows family stayed there once for a Trump rally, but it was not the kind place one would imagine a White House chief of staff spending the night.

Melanie Thibault, the director of Macon County’s Board of Elections, said she, too, was “kind of dumbfounded” that Meadows used the address to register to vote.

“I looked up this McConnell Road, which is in Scaly Mountain, and I found out that it was a dive trailer in the middle of nowhere, which I do not see him or his wife staying in,” Thibault said. Meadows’ voter registration card was sent to a post office box he provided, according to Thibault.

Meadows voted by absentee ballot in the 2020 general election, Thibault said. It’s a method of voting that Republicans in many GOP-led states are working to curb in their voter-suppression efforts.

It’s a federal crime to provide false information to register to vote in a federal election, The New Yorker noted.

During the Trump administration, the White House website posted a “sampling” of the “long and unfortunate history of election fraud.” Many of the examples involved people who listed false addresses when they registered to vote.

Trump repeatedly railed against voting by mail, even though he did it himself. Several other members of his administration, including Steve Bannon, Steven Mnuchin and Jared Kushner, were registered to vote in the 2016 election in two states (which is not in itself a crime). In 2019, Trump tried to register to vote in Florida using the White House address in Washington.

Gerry Cohen, an author of North Carolina’s voter-challenge statute, explained to The New Yorker that voters can have more than one residence, but the one used to register to vote must be a “place of abode” where a resident has spent at least one night and intends to remain indefinitely. If Debbie Meadows stayed in the mobile home a single night and her husband did not, Mark Meadows cannot use the address for his voter registration, Cohen noted.

Meadows did not respond to The New Yorker’s request for comment.

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