Republicans can't stop talking about a California dog who voted. Here's what really happened

It's a tale Republicans cannot resist telling: California mailed a ballot to a dog in Orange County and the dog successfully voted in the 2021 statewide recall election.

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor, told the story again earlier this month at a San Francisco campaign event as he lambasted California's election system: "If you haven't heard the story, a lady registered in Orange County registered her dog to vote. The dog was sent a ballot and voted. The dog voted in the 2021 recall election." 

Less than a week later, right-wing influencer Nick Shirley told a U.S. Senate committee: "In California a dog was able to vote in two elections."

Hilton, Shirley and others have invoked the dog to bolster their claims that California's election system is rife with fraud and to make the case for a Republican-backed November ballot measure that would impose new requirements on Californians to prove their identity when they vote in person or by mail. 

In their telling, the case is an example of California officials' ineptitude and lax enforcement. 

Democrats and voting rights advocates, meanwhile, say the story actually demonstrates the opposite: That having a law in place that expressly forbids registering nonhumans to vote did not deter someone determined to commit fraud, and that ultimately the system worked as intended, with the dog's owner caught and prosecuted. Meanwhile, they argue, stricter voter ID requirements will almost certainly disenfranchise residents who are legally eligible to vote.

Republicans' fixation on the dog voter - and the voter ID measure they say it justifies - echoes President Donald Trump's claims about the need for stricter voting requirements.

Trump has made undermining voter confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections - particularly those run by blue states - a centerpiece of his second term, one he discussed in a prime-time speech last week, in which he complained about how long it takes California to count votes. 

Trump has been obsessed with election results since losing in 2020 to Joe Biden by more than 6 million votes. He has spent the past six years trying to discredit that outcome.

Less than a week after retaking office in 2025, Trump made an unprecedented demand as California reeled from two devastating wildfires: Aid for the blazes would be contingent on the state passing a voter ID measure. California still has not received the billions of dollars in supplemental aid it's seeking.

But lost in most retellings of the tale are the revealing details of the dog voter and her owner.

The dog in question - Maya, a boxer who has reportedly since died - was owned by Laura Lee Yourex of Orange County. Yourex was charged with five felonies late last year for fraudulently registering her dog to vote at her address in Costa Mesa, and proceeding to cast ballots on behalf of the dog.

Yourex, a registered Republican, signed Maya up as a no-party preference voter in May 2020, according to prosecutors. That required submitting an affidavit including the voter's name, address, date of birth, party preference and attesting that the voter is a U.S. citizen.

It is signed under penalty of perjury. 

Yourex submitted a ballot for Maya in the 2021 state recall election, which was counted. But when she attempted to cast a ballot for Maya in the 2022 federal primary, election officials rejected it because it did not include the requisite proof of residence, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

Providing a valid address is required to vote in any California election. It's not clear why election officials did not catch Maya's 2021 recall vote, but that election was unique because it was a special election in which all voters statewide faced the same question. It's possible her voter registration received more scrutiny in 2022, when voters had to be placed into their respective districts to vote for offices like City Council and Congress.

The DA's office charged Yourex with five felonies in August 2025. In April, she pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of willfully registering a nonexistent person to vote. She has not yet been sentenced, but faces up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Why did she do it? That's become a crucial piece of the story. Yourex's lawyer and some Republicans have said that her crime was actually a benevolent attempt to expose flaws in the system.

Shirley told the Senate's Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee last week that Yourex "was only caught when the owner turned herself in to prove a point."

Yourex's lawyer, Jaime Coulter, told reporters that she "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. Ms. Yourex never hid from taking personal responsibility as she self-reported the matter to the Orange County Registrar of Voters, intending to have them investigate and ultimately improve our voting registration system." 

But those characterizations do not appear to be true.

Yourex bragged on Instagram multiple times about Maya receiving a ballot, but did not disclose that she was the one who had illegally registered the dog. 

Bob Page, the Orange County registrar, said Yourex never turned herself in to his office, as Coulter claimed, and that he became aware of the incident thanks to an Oct. 28, 2024 email from the city attorney for Huntington Beach, Michael Gates.

Gates questioned Page about the ballot, though his role as city attorney did not include oversight of Page's countywide role. "Do you have any information one way or the other about this person's Citizenship status for the United States?" Gates wrote, referring to the dog.

Page thanked Gates for notifying him about the potential dog voter, and said he'd referred the incident to the district attorney for investigation. 

Darius Kemp, California director for Common Cause, a voting rights advocacy group, said the Yourex case is not the silver bullet Republicans are making it out to be.

"This was one ballot of the nearly 13 million cast in the 2021 recall election. Orange County prosecutors were alerted, and the person behind this was held accountable," Kemp said. "One person's misguided and bizarre attempt to prove the existence of voter fraud by committing it, in fact demonstrated the strength of our election system, and must not be used as justification to make voting harder, less secure and more expensive for Californians."

In his response to Gates, Page reiterated that he would not provide the information that Gates was seeking.

"As I shared with you recently, voter registration information is confidential," Page wrote.

As city attorney, Gates was not in a position to escalate things any further. That changed when he joined the Trump administration.

Gates was among the DOJ attorneys who sued Page in 2025 for refusing to disclose sensitive voter data that Gates had demanded. A California federal judge ruled in January in a separate case that the DOJ's pursuit of that information was improper. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. for refusing to turn over voter rolls; federal judges have dismissed 16 of those, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Gates is now challenging Attorney General Rob Bonta in November. Gates mentions the dog ballot on his campaign website in a section about election integrity, and he reiterated its importance in an interview.

"This case is a very colorful instance where the state could not possibly be meeting its obligations under the federal Voter Registration Act to verify the eligibility" of each voter, Gates told the Chronicle. "When people say, ‘We know it's a one-off' - no, it literally proves we're violating elections law."

Matt Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicano studies at UCLA and the faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, disagreed.

"There is zero evidence - zero - of any widespread voter fraud, of people attempting to cheat the system in California. All you have are bad actors, typically on the right, attempting to commit voter fraud just to prove that they could do it," Barreto said. 

Gates said that if Yourex's decision to register her dog and proceed to vote under the dog's name "were to prove a flaw, she did it perfectly." At least until she was caught.

He then clarified: "I'm not condoning the commission of a crime."

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