Voter Fraud: American woman charged with registering her dog to vote

A California woman is facing six years in prison for allegedly registering her dog to vote and casting mail-in ballots in two elections, one of which was counted, the Orange County District Attorney's Office announced.

Laura Yourex is charged with five felonies for registering her dog Maya Jean and voting for the dog in two elections.

The 62-year-old was in court for the first time. She did not enter a plea but said in a statement that her intent was to improve the voting system.

“Laura Yourex sincerely regrets her unwise attempt to expose flaws in our state voting system, intending to improve it by demonstrating that even a dog can be registered to vote,” her defense attorney, Jaime Coulter, said.

The case is causing concern at the county level.

“You don’t register on purpose your dog or your cat or your horse or anything else,” Orange County supervisor Katrina Foley said. “You don’t do that on purpose to mock the system.”

Two members of the board of supervisors pushed for an emergency motion, which ultimately failed to have the voter rolls examined.

“So that we can find out from the registrar what he is going to do to stop what you said, Mr. Chairman and that’s dogs and cats from being enlisted on the rolls,” county supervisor, Don Wagner, said.

Another county supervisor, Janet Nguyen, wanted to examine the county’s dog license records to expose potential illegal voters.

“So, if we can cross-reference the addresses and the names to see if there’s potentially a name that could be suspicious, and then we can then say, wait a minute, let’s flag this,” she said.

Bob Page is the registrar of voters. He was the one who received the report in October.

“We take voter fraud very seriously. So when I received a report in October that there may have been a fictitious person who was registered to vote and had attempted to vote in two elections,” Page said.

“We referred that immediately to the district attorney to investigate, and he ultimately filed charges.”

Since the presidential election last fall, 175,000 names have been purged from Orange County’s voter files.

“They moved, they died, they were ineligible to vote, so I don’t support what I think is an anti-democratic way to try to test our system and people should be held accountable for that,” Coulter said.