Meadows’ voter registration under investigation in North Carolina
By Dianne Gallagher | CNN
State investigators in North Carolina are looking into the voter registration of Mark Meadows, the former Republican congressman and White House chief of staff who pushed baseless claims of voter fraud to try to overturn the 2020 election results.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation confirmed to CNN Thursday that its Special Investigations Unit is investigating allegations that Meadows registered to vote in 2020 at a home where he never resided. The investigation is being carried out in conjunction with the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
The state attorney general’s office agreed to ask the SBI to investigate Meadows’ voter registration after a local district attorney referred the matter to the North Carolina Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Section, Nazneen Ahmed, spokesperson for Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, said in an email to CNN.
“We have asked the SBI to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings,” Ahmed said.
The investigation comes after The New Yorker magazine reported that Meadows registered to vote weeks before the 2020 election at a mobile home in Macon County, where he allegedly never lived or even visited.
The article quoted the unnamed former owner of the McConnell Road property in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, as saying that Meadows’ wife “reserved the house for two months at some point within the past few years — she couldn’t remember exactly when — but only spent one or two nights there” and that Meadows himself had never even “spent a night in there.”
North Carolina voter records show Meadows registered at the Scaly Mountain address on September 22, 2020. He voted absentee by mail in the 2020 general election. That registration is still active.
Records show Meadows voted early in person in Transylvania County in the 2020 March primary, as well as in the 2018 primary and general elections. Before that, he was registered and voted in Jackson County.
The North Carolina voter registration form instructs a person to provide their residential address — “where you physically live” — and to check a box indicating whether they have lived at the address for 30 or more days. If not, a person must list the date they moved to that residence.
A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment to CNN.
Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch, a Republican, sent a letter Monday asking the attorney general’s office to “handle both the advisement of law enforcement agencies as to any criminal investigation as well as any potential prosecution of Mark Meadows.”
Welch said she was “unaware of any allegation of voter fraud surrounding Mark Meadows” until she was contacted by several news media outlets last week.
In the letter, Welch said she was recusing herself because Meadows made a 2014 contribution to her campaign and had appeared in advertisements endorsing her candidacy for district attorney.
“The allegations in this case involve potential crimes committed by a government official. Historically I have requested the attorney general’s office to handle prosecutions involving alleged misconduct of government officials. It is in the best interest of justice and the best interest of the people of North Carolina that the attorney general’s office handles the prosecution of this case,” Welch wrote.
Welch’s office had no further comment beyond releasing the letter.