Donald Trump and Republicans have been going on about rampant voter fraud by Democrats that they claim led to them losing the 2020 presidential election. They have alleged that ballot boxes were stuffed, electronic votes switched, voter rolls that had ineligible or dead voters, and the like. But they have been unable to provide any evidence that it has happened on anywhere near the scale required to tilt the election outcomes. In fact, if anything, the repeated investigations that they have instigated have shown that there was very little fraud of any kind by ordinary people.
But now it appears that there is at least one credible case of fraud. Unfortunately for them, it appears to have been committed by Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows who claimed a residence in North Carolina that he neither owned nor even ever visited, and yet he voted by absentee ballot from that address.
Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been removed from the electoral roll in North Carolina, amid a criminal inquiry into whether he committed election fraud by registering to vote at a residence he never owned or lived in.
Melanie Thibault, director of the Macon county board of elections, confirmed her decision to the Asheville Citizen Times, which reported that the registration for Meadows’s wife, Debra, remained active.
Before working for Trump, Meadows was a congressman from North Carolina.
According to the New Yorker, which reported the story last month, Meadows registered as his address a rented mobile home, in Scaly Mountain, which he reportedly had never visited.
He voted from there as an absentee in the 2020 presidential election. He has subsequently registered to vote in Virginia.
According to neighbors in Scaly Mountain and the former owner of the property, Debra Meadows rented and stayed at the mobile home for “a few nights” but her husband was never seen there.
It is not an uncommon tactic in politics to accuse one’s opponents of doing things that one is also guilty of. Meadows was one of the loudest voices alleging voter fraud.
He has not commented on this story.
Let’s not forget the Trumpy voters from The Villages in Florida: https://www.businessinsider.com/2-men-pro-trump-florida-the-villages-admit-voter-fraud-2022-4
And of course, they’re just getting a slap on the wrist.
The term is Every Accusation Is A Confession -- EAIAC.
There are some older, also generally amusing cases; e.g., Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick pays out $25,000 to Democrat who reported Republican voter fraud (October 2021):
From memory, another
republicanthug was caught in Pennsylvania(?), and one of thedemocratsdummies there (Attorney General?) tried to get Patrick to pay up, last I can recall without any success… (Some very quick searching has failed to confirm or update this memory.)Somehow I suspect mypillowguy won’t pay the $1mn reward for that splash of egg on his face.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the “stop the steal” meme started in 2014, regarding the republican attempt to sideline the Trump nomination. Basically, they just kept rolling with the claims of fraud because it was a convenient marketing vehicle. Amazing, right? Trump still claims that the election he won was rigged. I mean, it was -- the electoral college scam worked as designed. It’s classic conspiracy-thinking, though: “stopthesteal.org” domain was registered in 2014 according to Reveal.
Going strictly from memory, in my adult lifetime I can think of only a tiny handful of voter fraud cases and every single one of them involved a Republican voter.
I wonder why Meadows did this ?
And while the media is going to play this up , the ordinary Republican voter is going to look at this more as “See , So easy to fraudulently vote -- that must be whats happening in the blue states” as opposed to “My side are cheats”.
A lot of this runs back to the Bush Jr administration. This is when Ashcroft was made Attorney General after he lost his reelection as a Senator to a dead man. He was convinced that the vote had been rigged against him and ordered a nationwide investigation of voter fraud. It turned up little but the idea stuck in the Republican conspiracy mill and has been floating around since.
Much like moarscienceplz, all of the cases of fraudulent voting that I can remember hearing about have come from the right, and every time they explained why they did it, they claimed they were doing it to show how easy it is to double vote without being caught.
There have been a few (probably) Democrats who’ve been arrested for illegally voting. See if you can figure out how their cases are different, including the consequences.