By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mark Meadows, who served as former Republican President Donald Trump's chief of staff and echoed his false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, has been removed from the voter roll in North Carolina as the state investigates possible irregularities in his registration.
"The Macon County Board of Elections administratively removed the voter registration of Mark Meadows ... on April 11, after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there," North Carolina State Board of Elections spokesman Patrick Gannon said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
State authorities said last month that Meadows was being investigated in North Carolina over his voter registration. North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation was assigned to lead the probe after a district attorney referred the matter to the state Department of Justice Special Prosecutions Section.
The investigation was in response to claims that Meadows, who represented North Carolina in Congress from 2013 until joining the Trump administration in 2020, registered to vote in September 2020 with an address at which he did not reside, own or visit, the News & Observer newspaper had reported.
"What I found was that he was also registered in the state of Virginia. And he voted in a 2021 election. The last election he voted in Macon County was in 2020," Macon County Board of Elections Director Melanie Thibault said in an email on Wednesday.
In North Carolina, voters must live in the county where they are registering and have resided there for at least 30 days prior to the election date, according to the state elections board website.
Meadows was also the subject of contempt charges by a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which Trump and his supporters sought to stop the certification of now-President Joe Biden's election victory.