Skip to main content

Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Is Removed From North Carolina Voter Rolls

The move comes amid a state investigation into whether he committed voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Patrick Semansky/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been removed from the North Carolina voter rolls amid an ongoing investigation to determine whether he committed voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“The Macon County Board of Elections administratively removed the voter registration of Mark Meadows … after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Board of Elections, told us in a statement. 

“No formal challenge has been received by the Macon County Board of Elections,” he added. 

Macon County Board of Elections Director Melanie Thibault told the Asheville Citizen-Times that she had removed Meadows on April 11. Under North Carolina law, voters lose their state residence if they vote in another state’s election. As Meadows cast a vote in a 2021 Virginia election, he is considered to have lost his North Carolina residence, from which he cast an absentee ballot in the 2020 presidential election.

However, it’s also unclear whether Meadows ever actually lived in that residence and whether his 2020 vote was legitimate.

Earlier this year, at the behest of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, the State Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into Meadows after the New Yorker alleged that he had registered to vote in North Carolina with a residence where he may not have lived. 

About a month after Meadows had railed against voter fraud in a CNN interview, he and his wife Debra listed a 14-by-62-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina on their voter registration forms. Under North Carolina law, people are required to have lived in the county where they’re registering for at least 30 days before the date of the election. However, according to the property’s former owner, Debra Meadows had only stayed at the Scaly Mountain residence one or two nights, and her husband had never stayed there at all. 

Nevertheless, Meadows continued to push Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and routinely criticized mail-in voting as uniquely susceptible to fraud. He is not the only Trump official who has been accused of voter fraud of late.

We tried to reach out to Meadows through his lawyer but didn’t hear back.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate

We Noticed You Have An Ad Blocker On.

Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? We're a nonprofit (so it's tax-deductible), and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget.

We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism?