Mark Meadows – Image: CSPAN)
There was new evidence yesterday that the sordid and hypocrisy-laced saga of former North Carolina Congressman and Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows could be heading toward at least one of the ignominious conclusions it so richly deserves.
As you may have heard by now, election officials in Macon County have removed him from the state’s voter rolls after learning that he voted in Virginia in the 2021 election. The news comes on top of last month’s remarkable revelation that when Meadows voted a North Carolina absentee ballot in the 2020 election, he did so based on having registered at an address at which he never lived, and may never have even visited.
As Ed Kilgore writes for New York magazine’s Intelligencer website, the new information adds more fuel to hypocrisy-based fire that’s been consuming Meadows’ career of late:
Did Meadows just forget to notify Macon County that he no longer “lived” in the trailer home he may have never visited? A lot of people do move from state to state without going through the trouble of dropping their old registration, though not many of them go to the further trouble of re-registering with a dubious address in the state from which they have moved. Additionally, you might figure there is an extra burden of care in such matters for a man who said this (as the Washington Post reported) about a month before he re-registered in North Carolina at the trailer-home address:
“I don’t want my vote or anyone else’s to be disenfranchised. … 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.”
The irony is that Meadows apparently did re-register, but in two different states.
Just to make the whole situation even more absurd, Meadows’ wife Debra is still registered to vote at the rundown cabin in Scaly Mountain.
The bottom line: Meadows’ outrageous behavior is just the latest in a long line of incidents in which politicians of the right who rail about “voter integrity” have shown themselves to be opportunistic, “do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do” hypocrites for whom the real goal is suppressing the votes of disfavored groups, not faithful adherence to the law. Happily, a State Bureau of Investigations inquiry into the matter remains ongoing.
As Raleigh Congresswoman Deborah Ross tweeted yesterday:
If Republicans cared about election security as much as they say they do, then they should all be applauding this decision.
I’m glad our state is conducting a thorough investigation into the allegations of voter fraud against Mark Meadows. https://t.co/KBuc8BYJDc
— Congresswoman Deborah Ross (@RepDeborahRoss) April 13, 2022
When the voting fraud investigation is paired with his waist-deep involvement in Trump’s traitorous effort to overturn the 2020 election, it seems hard to imagine that Mr. Meadows won’t, like so many of Trump’s lackeys, be spending a great deal of time during the remainder of 2022 trying to fend off federal and state prosecutors.
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