Former Trump administration official Matt Mowers, who’s running for Congress, has been caught voting twice in the same election, which would seem — at least to some observers — to be a clear violation of federal law. The election in which Mowers cast two ballots was the 2016 Republican presidential primary — according to a new report from the Associated Press, Mowers initially voted in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary back in 2016. In that state, Mowers headed up the Chris Christie presidential campaign, and it’s in the same state where he’s now running for Congress. Four months after voting in New Hampshire, Mowers voted in the New Jersey Republican presidential primary after using his parents’ address to redo his voter registration.
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— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) April 4, 2022
Federal law explicitly prohibits “voting more than once” in “any general, special, or primary election,” which is both relatively straightforward and not exactly a surprise provision — it’s generally known that you can’t vote twice in the same election. In a statement showing exactly where loyalties lie these days within the Republican Party, Mowers’s campaign spokesperson John Corbett didn’t even directly address the apparent double-voting in a response to questioning related to the issue — but he did tout the work Mowers did for Trump. (After Christie’s campaign, Mowers joined up with the 2016 Trump operation.) “Matt was proud to work for President Trump as the GOP establishment was working to undermine his nomination… Matt moved for work and was able to participate in the primary in support of President Trump and serve as a delegate at a critical time for the Republican Party and country,” Corbett said. Okay? And what about the double-voting? People move all the time. That doesn’t mean they can vote twice in the same election. Mowers, it would seem, simply doesn’t care about the law, is profoundly inept, or both.
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— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) April 5, 2022
Besides that non-committal statement, GOP elections lawyer Charlie Spies contacted the Associated Press after an ask to do so by the Mowers campaign, and Spies called the double-voting “not the sort of issue anybody would spend time on.” The statutory time limits on prosecuting the federal offense in this instance have apparently run out, and according to the Associated Press, there’s an exception under New Hampshire prohibitions on double-voting for instances where someone “legitimately moved his or her domicile.” (The Associated Press didn’t immediately provide more details on that New Hampshire law.) Per the same outlet, taking up a prosecution of the offense would leave a court to “contend with complicated issues such as whether a primary could be viewed as a public election or as an event held by a private organization that is administered with government help” — although that federal law against double-voting does specify primary elections as covered by the prohibitions. Read more — including details on the Congressional race in which Mowers is engaged — at this link.
Matt Mowers, a former Trump administration official now running for Congress in New Hampshire, voted twice during the 2016 primary election season, potentially violating law and leaving him at odds with Republican Party's focus on “election integrity." https://t.co/k1h4jSTu2c
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 5, 2022
