ASHEVILLE – Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, now under investigation for alleged voter fraud in North Carolina, was scheduled to be the keynote speaker of a statewide Arizona anti-voter fraud event five days before the N.C. probe was announced.
Meadows was listed as the March 12 headliner for the Arizona Statewide Election Integrity Summit on the marketing and signup materials, which read “Special Keynote Speaker: Mark Meadows on ‘What Happened in 2020 and What We Must Do to Protect Future Elections in Arizona.'”
More than “300 fired-up Arizonans” attended, according to a Facebook post by the Arizona Republican Party.
Meadows did not appear to speak as scheduled. The former Western North Carolina congressman and President Donald Trump staffer is not shown in photos of participating panelists and speakers. In February he could be seen in photos of a a Georgia Election Integrity Summit where he spoke. He was not scheduled to speak at a Florida summit March 25-26.
Messages to Meadows spokesperson Ben Williamson and Arizona GOP Chair Dr. Kelli Ward were not returned.
Gary St. Arnauld, Democratic Party chair in Macon County — where Meadows registered and voted absentee from the address of a single-wide mobile that he never owned and was never known to visit — called the scheduled speaking engagement “a classic case of hypocrisy.”
“They say one thing and do the other,” St. Arnauld said March 23.
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The investigation, announced March 17, remains “ongoing,” according to SBI spokesperson Anjanette Grube.
Meadows has been a top proponent of the court-rejected theories that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election. That year he urged the Justice Department to investigate allegations of largescale election wrongdoing, despite no evidence it existed or affected the election outcome.
In January, Meadows became senior partner of the Conservative Partnership Institute. Founded by ex-Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, CPI materials feature pictures of Meadows.
It was a CPI project, the Election Integrity Network, that put on the Arizona gathering and other summits in different states.
Messages sent through the main CPI contact page and to EIN Chair Cleta Mitchell were not returned.
EIN encourages the formation of local citizen election integrity task forces to check on whether voters live where they say they do, according to its “Citizens (sic) Guild to Building Election Integrity Infrastructure.”
That can mean determining “whether voters have moved, or if the registrations are PO Boxes, commercial addresses or vacant lots,” the guide says.
“Develop protocols for obtaining evidence: photos of commercial buildings? Vacant lots? Affidavits from current residents that registered voter no longer resides at address on registration list,” the guide says.
Meadows and his wife Debra registered to vote at the Macon County address for the 2020 election, the year of a Senate race that some speculated Meadows might join. Other records point to them living in a condominium in Alexandria, Virginia.
According to the New Yorker, which first broke the story, current and former owners and neighbors briefly saw Debra Meadows at the Macon County home which she rented for a short time, but never her husband.
St. Arnauld, the county Democratic chair, said he talked to one of his party’s 15 precinct chairs who lives in the mountainous and sparsely populated Scaly Mountain community where the mobile home is located.
“I said, ‘Have you ever seen Mark Meadows or his wife drive by?’ And he said, ‘no.'”
Voter protection groups say actions promoted by organizations, such as EIN, are ways to “weaponize” conspiracy theories about election fraud.
EIN’s guide says never to “engage in any conduct that would imply or suggest that volunteers…
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