Mark Meadows, who quit his North Carolina congressional seat to become former President Donald Trump's White House chief of staff in March 2020, registered to vote for the 2020 election using the address of a rural North Carolina mobile home he never lived in and, according to its former owner, never slept at, North Carolina's WRAL reported Monday night. Meadows voted by mail from Alexandria, Virginia, in 2020, but he is still registered at the rental home in Scaly Mountain.
Registering using a residence you have never stayed at constitutes voter fraud in North Carolina and providing false information on your voter registration form is a federal crime, The New Yorker reports. North Carolina's registration form tells voters they must list the place "where you physically live," and notes it is a Class I felony to "fraudulently or falsely" complete the form, WRAL adds. Class I felonies can result in prison sentences of up to 12 months.
Meadows was a prominent critic of mail-in voting in 2020 and a vocal proponent of Trump's false post-election voter fraud claims.
The owner who rented the vacation home to Meadows' wife, Debbie Reynolds, in 2020 told WRAL that Mark Meadows "never spent a night down there" and Debbie Reynolds only stayed for a night or two. The neighbor in Scaly Mountain, a friend of the Meadows and a Trump supporter, verified that information to The New Yorker.
The current owner, a Lowe's manager named Ken Abele, told The New Yorker it's "really weird" Meadows would list the property as his place of residence for election purposes, or even rent the house in the first place. "I've made a lot of improvements" since buying the mobile home in August 2021, he said. "But when I got it, it was not the kind of place you'd think the chief of staff of the president would be staying."
Meadows did not respond to request for comment from either The New Yorker or WRAL. The couple now owns a $1.6 million lakefront estate in South Carolina, and they will presumably update their voter registration forms to reflect that.