Democratic congressional candidate Lakesha Womack is running to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Moore in North Carolina's 14th Congressional District, but property records show she purchased a home in north Charlotte — outside the district boundaries entirely. Her current voting address sits in south Charlotte, which does fall within District 14, yet a Zillow listing shows that same south Charlotte address posted for rent. Womack canceled a scheduled interview about whether she has moved out of the district and did not respond to a follow-up request for comment.
The questions around Womack's residency were first raised in a review by WBTV, which examined voting records for North Carolina's congressional delegation and found that two of the state's 14 representatives were registered to vote outside the districts they represent or seek to represent. District 14 itself stretches across Gastonia, Shelby, Morgantown, and parts of far south Charlotte, a sprawling footprint that resulted from a 2023 redraw removing heavily Democratic sections of Mecklenburg County and adding conservative Foothills counties, according to Wikipedia. Moore, a Kings Mountain Republican and former Speaker of the N.C. House, won the seat in 2024 after that shift turned a D+6 district into an R+8 one.
A Second Representative With the Same Issue
Womack isn't the only one. The same WBTV review found that Rep. Brad Knott, who represents Congressional District 13, has a voting address in Raleigh that actually falls inside District 2 — not the district he was elected to serve. A spokesperson for Knott did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the discrepancy, per the station's reporting.
North Carolina's redistricting whiplash helps explain how representatives keep winding up outside their own lines. The state has redrawn its congressional maps seven times between 2016 and 2025 through a mix of federal court rulings, state court challenges, and legislative action, according to PBS. Rep. Don Davis is living through that volatility right now — he was drawn out of his traditional district under a 2025 map and is running for re-election in boundaries redrawn to favor Republicans.
Why None of This Is Actually Illegal
Here's the twist: none of it violates the Constitution. Article I, Section 2, Clause 2 sets just three qualifications for House members — they must be at least 25 years old, a U.S. citizen for seven years, and an inhabitant of the state they represent when elected, according to the Constitution Annotated. There is no requirement that a House member live inside the specific district lines drawn around their seat, only the state as a whole.
That gap has been tested and upheld by the Supreme Court. In 1995's U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, the justices affirmed their earlier Powell v. McCormack ruling that neither states nor Congress can tack additional qualifications — like district residency — onto what the Constitution already demands of federal candidates. Those precedents mean state election boards cannot legally disqualify a congressional candidate simply for living outside the lines of the district they are running to represent.
It's also not a uniquely North Carolina phenomenon. A 2017 analysis found that at least 21 sitting U.S. House members nationwide were registered to vote outside the districts they were elected to represent, a trend that cut across both parties, per the Washington Post's reporting cited in research on the issue. Even Madison Cawthorn, the former North Carolina Republican congressman, announced in November 2021 he would abandon his 11th District seat to run instead in the newly created 13th District near Charlotte, before court-ordered map changes sent him back to the 11th, according to AP News.
State Races Play by Stricter Rules
The contrast becomes sharper when you look at North Carolina's own state legislature. Under Article VI of the North Carolina Constitution and candidate guidelines maintained by the state, candidates for the N.C. State House and State Senate must actually live in their specific legislative district for at least a full year before the general election — a bar that federal congressional candidates never have to clear. State law also spells out exactly how residency gets determined in disputed cases: North Carolina General Statutes Section 163-57 defines a voter's legal residence as the fixed place of habitation they intend to return to, and even specifies that if a boundary line splits a house in two, it's the location of the primary sleeping area that determines voting residency.
For voters in District 14 and District 13, that legal distinction may offer little comfort. A candidate or incumbent living outside the community they ask to represent remains, at minimum, a political liability — even when it isn't a legal one. Whether Womack addresses the Zillow listing on her south Charlotte address, or Knott's campaign responds to questions about his Raleigh voting record, neither case appears likely to end in disqualification. Under the framework the framers wrote and the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld, the only voters with real power to settle the question are the ones casting ballots in November.
