Donald Trump’s chief of staff was on the voter rolls in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia while he peddled the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.
Mark Meadows—the chief of staff to former President Donald Trump and prominent purveyor of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was rigged through widespread voter fraud—was, until last week, simultaneously registered to vote in three states and is still registered in two, The Washington Post reported Friday.
[pullquote]”Mark Meadows has some explaining to do.”[/pullquote]
According to the paper, Meadows was registered in Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina until he was removed from the latter’s voter rolls as state officials investigate whether he fraudulently voted in the 2020 election. He is still registered to vote in Virginia and South Carolina.
“Crystal Mason got five years prison for inadvertently voting. Pam Moses got six years prison for registering to vote,” tweeted human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid, referring to two Black women critics say were unfairly targeted for unwitting errors. On Friday, a Tennessee prosecutor dropped all charges against Moses.
“Why is Mark Meadows not in prison for deliberate voter fraud?” Rashid asked.
Speaking of voter fraud … https://t.co/V6aCPE5ldO
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 22, 2022
The government accountability watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) tweeted, “Mark Meadows has some explaining to do.”
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) quipped that “every GOP accusation is a confession.”
Meadows frequently invoked the prospect of Democrat voter fraud—something experts say is exceedingly rare—during the 2020 campaign. In an August 2020 CNN interview he asked, “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,'” he added.
Meadows played a key role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential contest, pressuring federal and state officials to reverse or investigate election results based on conspiracy theories and the former president’s baseless claims of fraud.
After Trump left office, Meadows was hired as a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a right-wing advocacy group claiming to promote “election integrity.”
According to the Post:
The organization’s “citizen’s guide” urges activists to determine that the registrations of their neighbors are legal by checking on “whether voters have moved, or if the registrations are P.O. boxes, commercial addresses, or vacant lots” and then “obtaining evidence: photos of commercial buildings? Vacant lots?” and “securing affidavits from current residents that a registered voter has moved”…
Meadows, in fact, was the keynote speaker at a CPI Election Integrity Summit in Atlanta on February 19. “What you’re doing is investing in the future of our country and making sure only legal votes count,” Meadows told attendees. He said he had just gotten off the phone with Trump, who he said had told him: “We cannot give up on election integrity.”
North Carolina investigators are focusing on whether Meadows voted by absentee ballot in 2020 using the address of a home that he neither owned nor lived in.
The bipartisan U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol has also called on the Justice Department to criminally charge Meadows after he was found in contempt of Congress for failing to appear before the panel to testify about his role in the deadly insurrection.
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