As we all know, anyone remotely connected to Donald J. Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party makes a big show of being ultra- vigilant about so-called “election integrity.”
But like a hellfire preacher with a taste for carnal sin, former congressman and Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been notoriously sloppy in his own compliance with voting laws. Last month news broke that he was registered to vote in North Carolina at a trailer home where he didn’t live and had in fact never been seen. (His wife had apparently spent a night or two there, but hardly enough for it to constitute a residence.) The Meadows couple listed that address after selling the home they owned in North Carolina and moving to a condo in Virginia to accommodate Mark’s new gig at the White House. The revelation led to a still-ongoing investigation by the North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein, a Democrat, for possible voter-fraud violations.
But then it came out that Meadows actually voted in 2021 in Virginia, while being registered in that state and in North Carolina. So election officials in Macon County, North Carolina, have now removed him from the rolls. This is a standard action taken when election officials discover someone has moved and registered elsewhere. But it’s another data point for the investigation of voter fraud.
Did Meadows just forget to notify Macon County that he no longer “lived” in the trailer home he may have never visited? A lot of people do move from state to state without going through the trouble of dropping their old registration, though not many of them go to the further trouble of re-registering with a dubious address in the state from which they have moved. Additionally, you might figure there is an extra burden of care in such matters for a man who said this (as the Washington Post reported) about a month before he re-registered in North Carolina at the trailer-home address:
I don’t want my vote or anyone else’s to be disenfranchised. … Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around. … Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, hey, by the way I’m re-registering.
The irony is that Meadows apparently did re-register, but in two different states.
In a you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up detail, the trailer-home address, which has now been officially disqualified as Mark Meadows’s residency for voting purposes, is in a locale with a distinctly reptilian name: Scaly Mountain, North Carolina. It actually appears to be a pleasant Appalachian community with snow tubing available and skiing nearby. But Mark Meadows doesn’t live there. What a snake.
