Mark Meadows, meet Lanisha Jones. She was punished for an NC voter fraud mistake.

Lanisha Bratcher Jones didn’t mean to do something wrong. She just didn’t know.

In 2019, Jones was one of four Hoke County residents charged with felony voter fraud from the 2016 election after ballots were cross-referenced with criminal records. Jones had served time in prison for a felony and was out on probation. Under North Carolina law, she wasn’t allowed to vote. No one told her that when she registered.

“I know what I did was for a good cause,” Jones told me over the phone this week, getting choked up explaining why she wanted to vote. “You want to see that change, especially in your neighborhood.”

Jones’s story resurfaced this week after The New Yorker reported that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows voted with the address of a mobile home in Macon County that he had never set foot in, let alone lived in long-term or owned. He also registered to vote in Virginia right before the state’s high profile gubernatorial race, resulting in him being registered in two states.

Although the story was published Sunday, the N.C. Board of Elections officials have not said whether they’d be handing the case over to prosecutors, who could charge Meadows with voter fraud. Meadows hasn’t spoken publicly about the story and allegations, but he has consistently pushed “the Big Lie” that there was mass voter fraud against the former president in the 2020 election

Jones made a mistake. Meadows, it appears, did not. And Jones, for her part, wants to see Meadows go through the same legal process she dealt with for two years, the same legal process that has continuously prosecuted Black North Carolinians.

“He should not be above the law,” she says, “because I was not.”

The law used to try Jones and the others on probation was written after Reconstruction as a blatant way of disenfranchising Black voters. Jones and other Black people made up close to 70 percent of the people suspected of voting on probation in 2016. Jones’s lawyer, John Carella, spoke to the court about the racism specifically. He says that when he did this, the prosecutor tried to charge Jones under other election violations, like “knowingly” signing a false statement and saying she voted in a different county than she was living in. After two years of legal battles, she ended up entering an Alford plea for a misdemeanor crime, and served six months unsupervised probation.

When Meadows and other hardline conservatives repeat the Big Lie, there’s often an underlying message: it’s not just that Democrats supposedly committed voter fraud, but that voters of color specifically did. It’s clear when you think about the onslaught of voter suppression bills in state legislatures last year that would have put even more burden on voters of color, and specifically Black voters.

Race was also a factor in the Bladen County election fraud case. When there was a hearing in 2019, a Black political action committee was dragged into the public record when defendants made unfounded allegations about the group also committing election fraud. The defendants suggested that since Black residents were committing voter fraud (they weren’t), the defendants had to do the same.

Carella doesn’t necessarily share Jones’s desire to see Meadows prosecuted.

“For me, that’s not the point,” he says. “Whether he gets prosecuted or not, what’s happening here reveals the injustice of all this.”

He sees it as proof that the felony voting law that condemned Jones needs to be completely reevaluated, something she wants to see too. Almost half of states never revoke someone’s right to vote, or only do so while the person is serving time in prison. North Carolina could follow along. The state already allows voting for people on probation for misdemeanors.

Jones is doing better in the aftermath of her voter fraud case. She says she “does her homework” before voting now, and she doesn’t mind speaking about her mistake and the aftermath of it — to her, it’s the way to affect change.

“Now I see that because I voted, I still have a voice,” she says. “They tried to shut me up, but I’m still here.”