Ok, so the image John uploaded of a known good me is exactly the same as the one I have been using that fails. The shasums match exactly. So I thought maybe somehow it is getting corrupted when coreboot creates the rom. I used the unhuffme tool to examine both the raw me image and the coreboot.rom file I am currently using. Both are identical except the full rom has 4 extra lines regarding the location of flash regions at the top.
The output of unhuffme is here: https://pastebin.com/zRsh6TqA
I downloaded the latest version of intelmetool to check out the live running me but it says my hardware is not compatible. I'm stumped at this point. If the me image is good why does the checksum fail on boot?