{"id":504147,"date":"2026-10-22T11:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T11:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/504147\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T11:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T11:44:09","slug":"in-trumpworld-dogs-who-commit-voter-fraud-arent-as-bad-as-immigrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/504147\/","title":{"rendered":"In Trumpworld, dogs who commit voter fraud aren’t as bad as immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When federal prosecutors charged 28 California immigrants with illegally registering to vote<\/a>, they invited friendly media outlets to document the early morning arrest of one suspect. <\/p>\n

At a news conference in Los Angeles this week, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli intoned that the defendants\u2019 alleged crimes proved President Trump\u2019s long-held conspiracy theory<\/a> that voter fraud threatens democracy and that noncitizens are voting by the boatload. Mug shots of the accused \u2014 lawful permanent residents, some of whom said they didn\u2019t recall registering to vote \u2014 were displayed as if they were part of a Mafia-like conspiracy.<\/p>\n

It all felt staged for maximum humiliation.<\/p>\n

So what happened to a Costa Mesa woman who registered her dog to vote and attempted to cast ballots for it in two elections? <\/p>\n

There was no perp walk for Laura Lee Yourex, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. No melodramatic news conference from Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer. <\/p>\n

Nah, Spitzer dismissed Yourex\u2019s case after she paid $1,500 for four electronic billboards<\/a> along the 22 and 55 freeways. They feature a photo of her late boxer Maya Jean sporting an \u201cI Voted\u201d sticker alongside a warning \u2014 \u201cDon\u2019t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime\u201d \u2014 and the district attorney\u2019s election fraud hotline number. <\/p>\n

Yourex\u2019s attorney has said she was trying to expose flaws<\/a> in the state\u2019s voter registration system by showing that even a dog could cast a ballot, a gimmick for which Spitzer had little sympathy.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s usually the modern-day equivalent of a hanging judge, the type of hard ass who wants his prosecutors to not only throw the book at defendants but also to bury them with a library. In an email, he told me that his office has successfully prosecuted two other voter fraud cases during his eight years in office and is pursuing three current ones. But as serious as voter fraud is, Spitzer has never preened in these cases the way Essayli has. <\/p>\n

The Republican stalwart declined to comment on Essayli\u2019s approach, saying he\u2019s \u201cnot privy to any of the evidence in those cases.\u201d When I asked why he chose a chuckle-inducing billboard as Yourex\u2019s punishment, he argued that it successfully \u201caddress[ed] the harm that is done when engaging in this type of criminal behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leave it to the Trump administration to make Spitzer \u2014 whose campaign slogan for his 2022 reelection was \u201c#NoLAinOC<\/a>\u201d \u2014 come off as a big ol\u2019 liberal softy. But when it comes to voter fraud, at least he\u2019s meting out penalties that fit the crime, while Essayli is once again making Trump his North Star, not the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The defendants charged with voter fraud deserve punishment, if they are indeed guilty. But as my colleagues Brittny Mejia and Kevin Rector reported, citing election experts<\/a>, cases of noncitizens registering to vote are often a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of immigrants, for example, if they accidentally check a box at the DMV. <\/p>\n

Essayli\u2019s record as Trump\u2019s top lawman in Southern California \u2014 he can\u2019t even call himself<\/a> the region\u2019s U.S. attorney, since he hasn\u2019t been confirmed by the Senate \u2014 is so laughable that I wouldn\u2019t believe him if he claimed that water is wet.<\/p>\n

His prosecutors have gone after activists involved in protests against Trump\u2019s masked deportation goons with shoddy charges that were dropped, rejected by grand juries, ridiculed as \u201camateur hour\u201d<\/a> by a federal judge or resulted in not guilty verdicts<\/a>. He\u2019s a lackey who silently stood and watched last year as FBI agents tackled Alex Padilla<\/a> during a news conference in Los Angeles just because the U.S. senator dared to challenge then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem\u2019s ludicrous defense of mass immigration raids. He\u2019s a coward who regularly declines to talk to press outlets \u2014 including The Times \u2014 that don\u2019t think Trump is the greatest president in history.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, my request to interview Essayli \u2014 or at least receive emailed answers to questions including whether every felony defendant gets arrested with a phalanx of armed officers surrounding their home, whether that\u2019s occurred in other voter fraud cases and whether his office regularly releases mug shots of felony defendants \u2014 went unanswered.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said his office is pursuing three voter fraud cases.<\/p>\n

(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Mejia and Rector spoke to some of the accused immigrants and their families<\/a> swept up by \u201cOperation Protect the Vote,\u201d who were bewildered as to what they had done wrong and why the U.S. Justice Department was swinging such a heavy hammer against them. They shouldn\u2019t be. <\/p>\n

What Essayli is doing in the name of rooting out voter fraud isn\u2019t about upholding the law. It\u2019s about validating Trump\u2019s xenophobia. The show trials the defendants will probably face are not about getting rid the worst of the worst, as Trump long claimed. It\u2019s about casting suspicion on all immigrants, legal and not. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s especially ironic \u2014 no, disgusting \u2014 about Essayli\u2019s claims that immigrants who wrongly register to vote are disenfranchising American citizens is that the portrait of this country\u2019s biggest election scofflaw hangs in every federal courthouse. It was Trump who wanted Congress to stop the electoral college from formalizing his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, claiming that Democrats stole the White House from him, and provoked a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol<\/a>. <\/p>\n

But facts have never stopped Essayli from making a pendejo out of himself. His pathetic, dangerous charade reminds me of an infamous voter fraud case from 30 years ago. I wrote about it this summer<\/a> when Trump first announced he was going to sic the Justice Department on noncitizens who were supposedly voting en masse. <\/p>\n

Back then, Loretta Sanchez forever changed O.C. politics when she beat Republican Rep. Bob Dornan<\/a> by fewer than 1,000 votes. Like Trump, Dornan claimed he lost because of immigrants who illegally voted. Like today\u2019s GOP, sympathetic prosecutors<\/a> and lawmakers<\/a> at the local and federal levels spent way too much time and taxpayer money looking into the baseless allegations. <\/p>\n

Just as Operation Protect the Vote has already shown this year, with only 28 charged<\/a> out of about 23 million registered voters in California, Sanchez\u2019s 1996 victory was not achieved through a vast immigrant voting conspiracy. <\/p>\n

At least in the Dornan fiasco, Republicans finally dropped their investigation and moved on. The few immigrants who did vote improperly had their ballots tossed but otherwise faced no legal problems.<\/p>\n

I doubt Trump and Essayli will give up so easily. That would require humility, mercy and the ability to admit they\u2019re wrong. <\/p>\n

But hey, if a dog can cast a vote in California, I guess anything\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When federal prosecutors charged 28 California immigrants with illegally registering to vote, they invited friendly media outlets to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[5781,1436,16891,2899,3982,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,7529,20096,3020,2034,5783,4486,26296,72,120944],"class_list":["post-504147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bill-essayli","tag-case","tag-defendant","tag-dog","tag-immigrant","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-news-conference","tag-noncitizen","tag-president-trump","tag-todd-spitzer","tag-u-s-attorney","tag-vote","tag-voter-fraud","tag-year","tag-yourex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}