Did Justice Department Official Illegally Vote in North Carolina? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Dr. Andy Jackson.

    Earlier this year, I wrote how former congressman and Trump administration chief of staff Mark Meadows may have committed voter registration fraud in North Carolina.

    According to a report by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), an official in the Department of Justice (DOJ) also allegedly committed voter registration fraud. Janie Sitton, who ironically works in the DOJ's Voting Section, voted in the 2020 election in North Carolina while maintaining her home in Washington D.C. as her legal residence:

    On 08/19/2020, Sitton registered to vote in North Carolina. As shown by the record of her voting history from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, soon after registering to vote, Sitton voted in the Presidential general election by absentee ballot, and then voted once more in a 2021 municipal election.

    It is important to reiterate that while she was voting in the North Carolina elections, she was claiming the homestead exemptions on her "primary residence" in the District of Columbia and a little over a year prior had taken a mortgage on the North Carolina property contingent on her North Carolina property being a second non-residence property

    After the 2020 presidential election, Sitton abruptly restored her D.C. voter registration in May of 2022.

    Looking at voting records from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, "Janie Allison Sitton" (voter registration number 000000136097) voted in Burke County from 2003 to 2010. She next voted in the 2020 General Election and again in a municipal election in 2021. The registration is currently listed as "removed" (see screenshot below). It was listed as "active" when the AAF did their search of Sitton's record, so the record has been changed in the last few weeks.

Screenshot of Janie Sitton's voter registration record taken on September 16, 2022.

    Sitton's case raises another problem with voter registration records. Another "Janie Allison Sitton" (voter registration number 000000041642) voted in Burke County in 1994 and 1996. A third "Janie A Sitton" (voter registration number 000000072341) voted in Orange County from 1985 through the spring of 1988. Janie Sitton graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1988. So it appears that the same person was registered under three different voter registration numbers in two counties in North Carolina. This reveals a weakness in our registration system that could allow people to be registered in two counties simultaneously.

    UPDATE: Again, none of Sitton's registrations were simultaneous. Some tweets posted in response to this article indicated that part of the problem was with pre-computerized and legacy registration systems that could not match registrations from different counties.