‘Finally, someone’s looking into this’: Woman registered her dog to vote to prompt investigation, now faces charges

THE DAILY SIGNAL — A woman facing voter fraud charges in California said her first reaction when investigators contacted her last August was, “Thank God, finally, someone’s looking into this.”

The state is probing why Laura Yourex registered her dog Maya, a Boxer, to vote in the 2020 election. In an interview with the New York Post, she said she was testing the system to expose what she believed were vulnerabilities.

Yourex said she notified the Orange County registrar of voters and the Huntington Beach city attorney’s office of the dog’s registration, and did so repeatedly.

“I’ve given my picture of Maya and her ballot, and given my phone number, and would never hear from anybody,” Yourex told the newspaper.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were broad concerns about how California’s mail-in ballots were distributed.

“I think that’s really what kind of set me off. We have two people living in this house—my husband and I—and we got six cards to register to vote,” she told the Post. “I was like, well, that’s ridiculous.”

She added, “If you look at the actual form that I sent in, it’s literally a made-up name, made-up birthday, no Social Security number at all. The only thing that was real on it was my address.”

A Republican-backed ballot initiative is advocating for voter ID in California.

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database shows that since 2020—when Maya was registered—there have been 25 adjudicated cases of voter fraud in the state. Of those, 23 ended in a criminal conviction.

The case also comes amid the debate over the SAVE Act, as the Senate considers a House-passed measure to require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to vote nationwide.

On another front in California, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco launched an election fraud investigation of the 2025 special election after a group of citizens raised concerns of irregularities.

After Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor, seized 650,000 ballots, the California state Supreme Court last week ordered him to pause his probe. A group of media outlets asked a court to unseal the warrant that led to the ballot seizures.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]