Mark Meadows Should Be Asked About His Voter Fraud In North Carolina

Update to Insurrection Coup Plotter Mark Meadows Is One Of The Rare Cases Of Actual Voter Fraud:

The headline at the Arizona Republic reads, without any hint of irony, that Mark Meadows to headline election conference in Phoenix (behind a pay wall), starting Friday afternoon and continuing Saturday.

Seriously? This insurrection Coup Plotter is one of the rare cases of actual voter fraud.

Maybe the GQP-friendly media in Arizona will find the time to ask this fraudster about his voter fraud.

The Washington Post report, N.C. investigates Mark Meadows after reports that he never lived where he registered to vote:

State investigators in North Carolina are probing Mark Meadows over his voter registration, after news organizations reported that the former White House chief of staff registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he has never lived in.

Anjanette Grube, public information director for the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, confirmed to The Washington Post Thursday that the matter is under investigation. News of the investigation was first reported by Raleigh-based TV station WRAL. The station reported that the North Carolina State Board of Elections is also investigating Meadows. A spokeswoman for the board referred questions to the state attorney general’s office.

“Local district attorney Ashley Welch has referred this matter to the Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Section, and we have agreed to her request,” Nazneen Ahmed, press secretary for the North Carolina Department of Justice, said in a statement.

“We have asked the SBI to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings.”

[A]ccording to a report by the New Yorker earlier this month, Meadows filed his voter registration in September 2020, three weeks before North Carolina’s deadline for the general election, listing his residential address as a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C.

Neither the home nor the property with that address have belonged to him, and he has never lived there, the magazine said.

It is unclear whether Meadows has spent even one night at that address. The small mobile home belongs to a Lowe’s retail manager, who bought it last summer from a widow living in Florida. The woman, whom the New Yorker did not identify by name, told the magazine that she had no idea Meadows had listed the home as his address in his voter registration form.

After the 2020 election, Meadows promoted Trump’s false claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

And this is what Mark Meadows is coming to Arizona to do: to promote the GQP’s “voter fraud” fraud in support of Donald Trump’s Big Lie. The media has an obligation to call out the fraud by this election conference and Mark Meadows.

The New York Times reports, Republicans Push Crackdown on Crime Wave That Doesn’t Exist: Voter Fraud:

The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.

In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.

And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.

Note: A similar bill to expand the powers of Arizona Attorney General’s Office Election Integrity Unit to investigate voter fraud recently failed in the stte senate. AZ Senate votes against bill expanding attorney general election investigation powers.

Also, “In Arizona, MAGA/QAnon insurrectionist State Senator Wendy Rodgers, a Republican who is trying to overturn the 2020 election, is sponsoring a bill that would establish an “election bureau” to investigate fraud with sweeping authority, including the ability to impound election equipment and records.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.

It is a new phase of the Republican campaign to tighten voting laws that started after former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims of fraud following the 2020 election. The effort, which resulted in a wave of new state laws last year, has now shifted to courthouses, raising concern among voting rights activists that fear of prosecution could keep some voters from casting ballots.

“As myths about widespread voter fraud become central to political campaigns and discourse, we’re seeing more of the high-profile attempts to make examples of individuals,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.

In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.

In Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcementagencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud in the state from the 2020 election.

And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commissionsaid that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.

“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”

The political incentives to draw attention to the enforcement of voting laws are clear. A Monmouth University poll in January found that 62 percent of Republicans but just 19 percent of Democrats believed voter fraud was a major problem.

That may mean the odds of being charged with voter fraud can be linked to the political affiliation of the local prosecutor.

Or the decision not to prosecute can be linked to the political affiliation of the local prosecutor. In a clear case of election fraud by fake GQP electors,  Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich aka “Nunchucks” (or is it Numbnuts?) reportedly looked into the fake GQP electors, but has not prosecuted anyone because they are Republicans. This is a political scandal of a coverup by the AG’s office not getting nearly the attention it deserves. Why aren’t Arizona’s treasonous fake electors in jail?

After the 2020 election, two groups of Arizona Republicans falsely declared themselves presidential electors, signed fake electoral certificates, and sent them to Washington, D.C., hoping to subvert the constitutional work of the Electoral College, overturn the outcome of a duly certified election and, in essence, stage a coup that would have kept Donald Trump in office.

These disgruntled Republicans call themselves patriots.

But you can’t claim to be a patriot and then act in a way that contradicts the entire notion of what that means.

No sign that fake electors will be prosecuted

Yet, so far, none of the phony electors has paid any price.

We learned from an article by The Arizona Republic’s Richard Ruelas that Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office contacted the Office of the Federal Register about paperwork one group of fake electors sent to Washington that used the official state seal.

But nothing has come of it. Then again, should we expect Brnovich – currently running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate – to go after fellow Republicans while simultaneously trying to win the GOP’s primary election?

Actually … YES.

Unless the oath he swore about upholding the constitution when he became the state’s top law enforcement officer didn’t mean anything.

The other group of fake electors, headed by Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, has also avoided any real trouble, although Ward, Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem and a few others have been subpoenaed by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

There’s a word for them. It’s not ‘patriot’

So far, the only people who have paid a price for the post-election coup attempts and the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection are the taxpayers footing the bills for all of the investigations and court cases.

In other words, us.

The post-election legal challenges that made outrageous, unproven claims about voter fraud were tossed by judges again and again.

The sham election audit conducted in Arizona by the Cyber Ninjas, at the behest of Republican state Senate President Karen Fann, has been thoroughly debunked and disproven, another enormous waste of money.

And for what?

We either learn something from the dark days surrounding Jan. 6 or we’ll repeat them.

Even the way we talk about the fake electors’ underhanded power play matters.

The Arizonans who aspired to undemocratically keep Donald Trump in office also attempted to stage a coup on the English language.

There is a word for someone who tries overturn the outcome of a duly certified election, but it is not “patriot.”

It’s traitor.

The real issue is authoritarian GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression and voter disenfranchisment. Texas’s voter suppression law got its first test. It worked like a charm:

The latest phase of the Republican war on voting just got an early test in the primary election in Texas. If you believe in democracy, it was a horror show. If you’re a Republican, it was a smashing success.

[T]oday, two things have opened the door to much more ambitious voter suppression: an extended attack on voting rights by the [radical] conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a new GOP consensus that rejects the idea of universal participation, sees only Republican electoral wins as legitimate, and justifies almost any tactic to defeat liberalism.

In Texas, we see how it’s playing out. The Associated Press has released a new analysis covering 85 percent of the votes cast in the March 1 primary, the first held after Texas passed a bill imposing new rules and restrictions on voting, especially absentee voting. The results are stunning.

A small number of absentee ballots always get rejected by election authorities if a voter didn’t follow instructions, such as failing to sign their ballot. Typical rejection rates are around 1 or 2 percent; in the 2020 general election, the national rejection rate was 0.8 percent, while in the 2018 midterm election, it was 1.4 percent.

The rejection rate for absentee ballots in this year’s Texas primary was 13 percent.

Most of the problem lay in the new verification method, which replaced signature-matching with the requirement to provide an ID number. Many voters apparently didn’t even realize they had to do so. (The spot to write your ID number was hidden under the envelope flap.) Even more disturbing, while you could provide a number of different IDs, the one you put on your ballot had to match the one you put on your ballot application.

Note: A bill requiring this same voter ID number method was introduced in the Arizona legislature, and would result in this same disenfranchisement of voters.

So for instance, say you applied for an absentee ballot and supplied the last four digits of your Social Security number. But then months later, you fill out your ballot. You ask yourself: What number did I use? I can’t remember, so I’ll just put in my driver’s license number — the state knows who I am that way, right?

Wrong: Because you used two different numbers, your ballot was rejected.

Because so many ballots were rejected, thousands of Republicans’ votes didn’t count in this election. But it appears substantially more votes from Democrats were trashed. The largest number came from heavily Democratic Harris County, where Houston is located: About 19 percent of mail ballots there were rejected.

By comparison, says the AP, “In the five counties won by Trump that had the most mail-in primary voters, a combined 2,006 mailed ballots were rejected, a rate of 10% of the total.”

You might expect Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the Republicans who wrote and passed this law to come out and say, “This was obviously a disaster. We have to do something to make sure all Texans get their votes counted.” But the most we’ve heard is assurances that people are getting used to the new requirements and things will be better next time. The governor’s office blamed local election officials for “erroneously interpreting the law.”

But the high rates of rejection are a feature, not a bug. The law is working just as it was supposed to. As Lina Hidalgo, the chief executive of Harris County, put it, “It’s a game designed to trick you at every turn.”

[S]hould [Democratic organizing overcome the suppression measures], Republicans in the legislature will almost certainly get right to work on a new set of rules and requirements, designed once again to make voting harder for the groups that usually vote more for Democrats, such as Black people, young people, or city dwellers.

That’s a key feature of the current wave of GOP voter suppression laws: It’s an ongoing process of experimentation. Some measures will work as Republicans hope and will be kept in place, while others won’t and will be discarded.

Republicans will continually come up with new suppression methods, each one offered with the line that they want to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat,” as they said about the Texas law.

The results from the primary show what a lie that was. But don’t expect to hear it any less in the future. The Republican war on voting will never end, as long as there are Democrats with the temerity to believe they have an equal right to participate in their democracy.