Orange County woman registers her dog to vote in 2021. 3 years later, she avoids 6 years in jail but must fund billboards featuring her pet’s face

The topic of voter fraud resurfaces with every election in the United States. While midterm elections for 2026 are already underway in many states, a 2021 voter fraud case has finally reached a decision regarding the consequences a woman in Orange County, California, will face, according to Dexerto.

Laura Lee Yourex managed to register her dog, who was deceased before the event, to vote in the 2021 gubernatorial election. She tried to repeat this process in 2022, but that registration was rejected. Investigators found that Yourex apparently self-snitched by posting about her fraud on social media, including a picture of her dog wearing an “I Voted” sticker.

Yourex reached a plea deal to avoid jail time

Yourex was charged with five felonies. They included perjury, registering a non-existent person to vote, procuring a falsified document, and two counts of casting a ballot when not entitled. The total jail time for these felonies would have been six years, but Yourex reached a plea deal that lets her avoid serving any jail time.

Instead of jail time, Yourex accepted an uncommon punishment. She’s funding four billboards that will go up in Orange County with the image of her dog with the “I Voted” sticker and a warning that voter fraud is a crime. They even include the phrase “Don’t be a dog” on them.

Voter fraud actually isn’t that common

There are a lot of claims about fraud, with the current target being voting by mail, but the numbers show that voter fraud isn’t common. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law compiled several studies on fraud over the years to show that the numbers don’t match some claims that have been made on the topic.

A political scientist from Columbia University published a study in which he tracked voter fraud claims for two years and found that these claims could usually be traced to “false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief, and administrative or voter error.”

The Washington Post published a study that investigated claims of fraud from 2000–2014 and found 31 credible claims of impersonation fraud out of over a billion ballots, making the rate of fraud incidents tiny in comparison.

One researcher even went back 30 years while writing a book in 2012 to try to find a case in which fraud determined the results of an election, but he was unable to find any such cases.

While Yourex managed to vote as her dog, and such cases pop up in the news from time to time, the numbers show that even with these cases, the outcomes of elections are supported by several studies to be quite accurate.

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