Orange County wants to know: Are any dogs or cats registered to vote?

• Orange County officials directed the county registrar to cross-reference voter rolls with pet registration data in the county to make sure no pets are registered to vote.
• The effort to clean up voter rolls comes after a woman was charged with registering her dog to vote in Orange County.

There are Democrats, Republicans and independents, but now Orange County officials are trying to identify how many dogs and cats may be registered to vote.

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On Tuesday, the Orange County Board of Supervisors directed staff to cross-reference voter rolls with pet registration data in the county in order to make sure there are no four-legged voters with names like Fido, Fifi, Spot, Sparky or Lucky casting ballots in the next special election in November.

“How do we check that dogs and cats or whatever are not on our [voter] rolls?” Supervisor Dan Wagner asked during the meeting Tuesday.

The measure, introduced by Wagner and Supervisor Janet Nguyen, came after a Costa Mesa woman was charged early this month with five felony counts after allegedly registering her dog to vote, and then casting ballots for the pet in two elections. The woman, Laura Lee Yourex, 62, had allegedly registered her dog, Maya Jean Yourex, to vote in the 2021 gubernatorial recall and the 2022 primary.

Yourex — the owner, not the dog — was charged with felony counts of perjury, offering a false document to be filed, two counts of casting a ballot when not entitled to vote, and registering a nonexistent person to vote, according to the district attorney’s office.

“The idea that pets, or any other non-human, could be registered to vote and participate in election is both absurd and deeply alarming,” according to the memo from the two supervisors. “The Board of Supervisors must act now to restore public confidence.”

Since news of the charges came to light, supervisors directed the Orange County Registrar of Voters to review thousands of voter records to ensure that no other pets have been registered to vote in the county and, on Tuesday, directed the agency to expand that review to thousands of more pet registrations to ensure no other four-legged pets are casting votes.

The registrar recently checked pet registrations in all unincorporated communities in the county against voter records, and was directed Tuesday to try to expand that review to pet registrations in all incorporated cities within the county.

Wagner called the news of a dog being registered to vote a sign of a larger problem.

“They’re symptoms of a problem with our voting rolls,” he said.

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times