Connect the Dots 101

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his wife, Debra Meadows.

On her one-stop application, provided this week by the North Carolina Board of Elections to The Fact Checker, Debra Meadows certified that she had resided at a 14-by-62-foot mountaintop mobile home for at least 30 days — even though she did not live there. At the top of the form is a notice that “fraudulently or falsely completing this form” is a Class I felony.

This form is the latest in a string of revelations concerning the former chief of staff — who echoed President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020 — and his wife.

…There is precedent in North Carolina for seeking a severe penalty for someone who put false information on an early voting application.

Latisha Bratcher Jones, a North Carolina resident, in 2016 also filled out a one-stop application, believing she was able to vote even though she had served time in prison for felony assault and was out on probation. A section of the same form asked whether someone who had committed a felony had completed their probation. A grand jury in 2020 indicted her for making a false affidavit regarding the fact she was on probation — and also for saying she resided in a different county than the one in which she voted.

North Carolina officials later acknowledged that the state did not have a standardized process for informing people on probation they couldn’t vote. Indeed, documents obtained by the Guardian in 2019 showed that state officials concluded Jones may have illegally voted unintentionally.

But a prosecutor still brought felony charges that could have resulted in 19 months in prison. Her attorney argued that the probation prohibition stemmed from a 19th-century law designed to disenfranchise Black voters.

She eventually settled the case by entering an Alford plea for a misdemeanor crime — related to the charge that she resided in a different county than one from which she voted.

“I did not know what I was doing,” she said. “All I did was try to vote.”

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/23/debra-meadows-appears-have-filed-three-false-voter-forms/