Outside the Beltway

No Voter Registration Fraud Charges for Meadows

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, January 1, 2023 · 3 comments

Back in March, I noted that former Trump Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, had apparently been registered to vote in North Carolina at a locational where he likely had never ever visited. After an investigation, the AP reports that charges will not be brought: AG: Meadows won’t face voter fraud charges in North Carolina.

Based largely on the findings of a voter fraud investigation completed by the State Bureau of Investigation, Attorney General Josh Stein told The Associated Press that there isn’t sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution of Meadows or his wife, Debra.

“Our conclusion was … they had arguments that would help them if a case was brought such that we didn’t believe we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they had engaged in intentional voter fraud,” Stein, a Democrat, said in an interview.

[…]

Stein said career prosecutors within his department recommended that charges not be pursued. In a memo to Stein, those attorneys said evidence showed Meadows and his wife had signed a yearlong lease for the Scaly Mountain residence that was provided by their landlord. Cellphone records indicated Debra Meadows was in and around Scaly Mountain in October 2020, the memo said, and her husband qualified for a residency exception in state law because he was in public service in Washington.

[…]

Public records also indicated that Meadows was registered to vote in Virginia in 2021 and in South Carolina this March, after he and his wife purchased a home there.

As I noted in my post back in March, if George H. W. Bush could claim a hotel in Houston as his residence so as to make Texas his state of residency, I really don’t care if Mark Meadows claims a mobile home in the mountains of North Carolina. As long as he only voted in one place, the rest doesn’t much matter.

The reason any of this is newsworthy (and, indeed, why it is also galling) is that this kind of low-level bureaucratic confusion is the kind of thing that Meadows and his ilk use to try and construct their claims about rampant electoral fraud. The notion, for example, that a person might erroneously be registered in more than one place is a problem in reality if, and only if, that person attempts to vote in more than one election at the same time. Else, all it does is create a very minor error in the turnout calculation (or, when taken in mass, can give some dishonest commentator a reason to question the “integrity” of the election because there are still nonresidents who are registered!).

It is also galling because it is using vote by mail because it is a major convenience for Meadows. Yet the administration he worked for tried everything in its power to discredit vote by mail because, well, that wanted to make voting harder and also saw denigrating democratic functions to be to their political advantage. It is as if all their caterwauling on the subject was just a bunch of self-serving nonsense that they really didn’t believe.