Guess which White House employee just got caught casting a mail-in ballot using a false address. No, not the president. That was last week.
Here’s a hint: After Trump ranted about widespread vote fraud and kids who “raid the mailboxes and they hand them to people that are signing the ballots down at the end of the street,” this Harvard Law grad and ATL alum defended her boss, telling Newsweek, “Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person. President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.”
Oh, you dummies in the media! Or perhaps not, since Newsweek managed to suss out that Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany voted by mail 11 times since 2010, and now Huffington Post’s S.V. Date and Ryan Reilly have discovered that McEnany used her parents address in Tampa to cast her votes in the 2018 midterms, despite living in DC, possessing a New Jersey drivers license, and owning a separate home in Tampa with her husband. Whoopsie!
In 2017, McEnany was appointed spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee (RNC), which is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. In 2019, she joined the Trump campaign as national press secretary, during which time she voted by mail in Florida’s March 2019 presidential primary, before taking a job at the White House this past April. There are a lot of places in the DMV where McEnany could have resided in the past three years while shilling for the Trump team full time, but Florida isn’t one of them.
Indeed, it’s not clear when McEnany last resided in the Sunshine State, although she and her husband Sean Gilmartin, a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays, do own a home in Tampa. According to HuffPo, McEnany held a driver’s license from Edgewater, New Jersey, when she purchased the Tampa residence in 2017. Because, sure, why not.
HuffPo reports that McEnany was interviewed by a Tampa radio station in 2019 and claimed that she worked in DC but flew to Florida “pretty much every weekend.” And later that year, she did manage to switch her official residence to her own house in Tampa, yet in both the primary and general elections of 2018, McEnany mailed in her vote using her parents’ address to substantiate Florida residency. And in the March 2020 presidential primary, she cast a mail-in ballot in Florida, although she was then employed full time for the Trump campaign, living in DC.
All of which is rather awkward for a person whose party is incessantly flogging conspiracies about electoral fraud and the need to “True the Vote” by purging voters. Wisconsin’s GOP is suing to toss 129,000 voters off the rolls for potential ineligibility due to address changes, Crystal Mason, a black mother of three in Texas, is facing a five-year sentence for mistakenly casting a ballot when she was ineligible, and the president is peddling nonsense about illegal voters who “go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
Meanwhile the president is trying to register to vote using his business address and his 32-year-old spokesperson voted multiple times using her parents’ address where she does not appear to have resided since she graduated from high school. Will McEnany face prosecution by the state of Florida for illegal voting?
Don’t hold your breath. Although … if she did happen to, say, file her state return in Florida, which has no income tax, while spending upwards of 180 nights a year in DC and working there full time, those “dummies” in the media are probably going to figure it out. Because DC residents have to pay DC taxes, no matter where they claim to “reside.” And that’s a “simple distinction” even a Harvard Law grad should be able to grasp.
As They Scream Voter Fraud, Trump And His Press Secretary May Have Voted Illegally [HuffPo]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.