NY Citizens' Voter Audit Challenges Blue-State Hegemony
When you first hear about the group New York Citizens Audit (NYCA), you wonder why it took so long for regular citizens to start scrutinizing their own voting rolls. It's shocking ,really, even contrary to the American spirit, to think that voters in every state have taken so long to self-police their own voting process — instead assuming that whatever was happening was somehow honest, legitimate, or even legal by their states' own declared laws.
It is those declared laws that Marly Hornik is using as a litmus test as she and her nearly 1,500 volunteers review New York State voter rolls they obtained from the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE), as well as rolls obtained from individual counties.
It all started, Hornik says, when she and like-minded individuals were told they were "not essential" early in the pandemic:
We were told 'You can stay home now, and if you'd like to come back to work you can participate in a medical experiment.' And so we thought gosh, while we're home, let's just get a copy of the New York State voter rolls and see what we find. We thought in a deep blue state like New York, we probably wouldn't find much interesting, because...why would you go to all that trouble and hassle and potential legal difficulty if you already have a solid voting base that you can rely upon?
On October 21, 2021, they received their first copy of the state voter roll database, called NYSVoter. Then, using FOIA requests, they asked every county board of elections for copies of its local database (not all complied). Hornik said this was important because election law is clear that county boards of elections maintain their own databases, with the state database basically acting as a compilation. The state has almost no authority to add, change or delete any kind of information from the database. When NYCA first began, the 2020 general election was the primary focus.
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