Pets & People

She Registered Her Dog to Vote to Prove It Was Easy. It Was.

A California woman got a ballot mailed to her dog, twice. The case ended this month, and the ending is stranger than the stunt.

By Jordan Ellis, Certified Dog Trainer

April 24, 2026 · 4 min read

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The photo is the part everyone remembers. A dog, an “I Voted” sticker, a completed ballot, posted to Facebook by her owner without visible concern.

The dog was Maya. Her legal name, as far as Orange County’s voter rolls were concerned, was Maya Jean Yourex. And she voted.

Laura Lee Yourex of Costa Mesa registered her dog to vote, received mail ballots in the dog’s name, and cast them in two separate California elections. That is not the surprising part. The surprising part is why she did it, and how the case ended.

What actually happened

Yourex, now 63, got Maya onto the rolls and then returned mail ballots under the dog’s full name twice: once in the 2021 gubernatorial recall in California, and again in the 2022 primary.

The dog’s 2021 vote was counted. The 2022 one was not.

That split is the entire mechanism of the story. California asks for neither ID nor proof of residence to vote in a state election, which is how a ballot mailed to a four-legged voter sailed straight through the recall (the one Californians rejected, with 61.9 percent voting no). Federal races are a different animal: an address and an ID are both required. Maya’s 2022 primary ballot hit that requirement, got flagged, and died there.

So the system caught the dog. It just took a federal race to do it.

The twist: she told on herself

This was not a woman who thought she had gotten away with something.

Yourex brought her own scheme to the attention of then-Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates, apparently to demonstrate how easy it was to commit voter fraud in California. Gates alerted the Orange County Registrar of Voters. The registrar alerted the district attorney.

She had also been publicizing it. In January 2022, she put up a picture of Maya in an “I Voted” sticker, ballot beside her. That October came another post: Maya’s dog tag, a vote-by-mail envelope, and a caption noting the ballots were still arriving. Maya, by then, had died.

The stunt worked, in the narrow sense. She proved a mail ballot could be issued to a nonexistent person. She also, in doing so, committed the crime she was trying to expose, on camera, repeatedly, and then handed the evidence to a city attorney.

The charges, and the deal

In September 2025, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office hit Yourex with five felony counts: perjury; offering a forged or false document for filing; registering a nonexistent person to vote; and two counts of voting while not entitled to. Maximum exposure: six years in state prison.

On April 10, 2026, she pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of knowingly registering a nonexistent person. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed the four remaining felony counts. Her maximum exposure dropped from six years in state prison to no more than a year in county jail.

She is scheduled to be sentenced on October 16.

What it actually demonstrates

Both sides of this will read the outcome as a win, and that is what makes it interesting.

If you believe California’s mail-ballot system is dangerously loose, here is a woman who got a dog registered and had one ballot counted. That happened. It is not a hypothetical.

If you believe the system is sound, note that the fraudulent vote was a single ballot in an election decided by nearly 24 points, that the fraud was flagged by the very ID requirement that governs federal races, that the perpetrator was caught, prosecuted, and convicted, and that the whole scheme required someone to publicly and repeatedly announce what she was doing. As proofs of concept go, it demonstrates a system with a real gap and a functioning immune response.

Maya, for what it is worth, has been out of the electoral process for some time now. Her voting record is sealed, her party registration is unknown, and her opinions, whatever they were, remain her own.