The New York Citizens Audit has produced some of the most substantive work in the country on the subject of voter registration rolls and their impact on lawful elections. Historically, the group's focus has been the investigation of the state's dirty voter registration database, which leads to illegal votes cast and low confidence in elections.
The group believes their findings show the state's database has been breached and is being manipulated. According to NY Citizens Audit Director Marly Hornik, the group allegedly found a "secret fraudulent phantom voter infrastructure embedded in the voter rolls" that allows for the undetectable "track[ing] and extraction of every registration based on their character to assign votes when needed." Notably, similar hidden infrastructures have been found in other states' voter registration databases.
NY Citizens Audit has urged official investigations in response to their findings because the group believes the alleged breach poses a threat to the national security infrastructure. Harnik's team collaborated to produce a substantive report on the state's voter rolls, which was covered in a column by UncoverDC in August 2022.
Hornik has now added two other documents to further her mission; the Deficits Report on the 2020 Election and a Resolution for an Audit of the New York State 2022 General Election. UncoverDC caught up again with Hornik on Monday to review her group's latest substantive contributions to restoring election integrity in her home state of New York. Throughout her investigation, Hornik has been careful to ensure that all of her efforts are transferrable and useful in other states. She cites the legal and constitutional underpinnings of the right for every citizen to enjoy free and fair elections that prevent the "debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote."
Hornik's Work Just Prior to the 2022 Midterms
Just before the 2022 election, Hornik worked tirelessly around New York to find a candidate who would agree to file a lawsuit to challenge the certification of the 2022 midterm election. All of them balked, including Republican candidate for governor Lee Zeldin. She also attempted to put pressure on the state GOP to join a lawsuit but again came up empty-handed. Her pitch to Zeldin and others was, "nothing about the conduct of elections had changed in New York since 2020, so why should the election be automatically certified in 2022?!" Sadly, not a single candidate championed her efforts.
Undaunted by the roadblocks, Hornik shifted gears and proceeded to craft two documents that aspire to secure "the operational integrity of elections" in the state. One of the documents is a 16-page Deficits Report with its accompanying one-page summary. The Deficits Report connects the dots, explaining in black and white how the state's voter rolls fail to follow the law. The other document is called the Resolution for an Audit.
The Resolution for an Audit
The second document is an elegant 5-page Resolution for an Audit calling for a "complete end-to-end audit of the New York State 2022 General Election." The Resolution is meant to be signed by any number of officials in the state. As such, it is a customizable Resolution and is currently being delivered by volunteers to officials all over the state. Their mission: to get officials in the state to commit to three things: an audit, enact legislation pursuant to the goals of lawful elections, and the criminalization of election misconduct "explicitly with regard to State election law." The specified recipients of the Resolution are the "Town Board Members, County Legislators, State Legislators, Federal Legislators, Law Enforcement, Federal and State Prosecutors, and Judges." It lays out the five necessary processes to ensure the "operational integrity" of elections as defined by law.
NY Citizens Audit/Resolution
The Deficits Report
The Deficits Report reflects several foundational principles that are integral to free and fair elections, reflected in the graphic below:
NY Citizen's Audit/Marly Hornik/Deficits Report
The report is both educational and mission-oriented. Hornik has spent hours with groups all over the country, educating everyday citizens on what they should and can expect from their elected officials and legislators. Using the findings from the August NY Citizens Audit Report, whose raison d'etre was to "perform an open source audit" of the 2020 General Election, Hornik crafted the Deficits Report to show how election guidance laws were thrown out the window. She and her team examined the voter rolls finding multiple violations of state election laws. These violations include but are not limited to falsifying records, registrations with no trackable records, ineligible registrations, phantom voters, and many inaccuracies and discrepancies in the registrations that effectively make the rolls completely unreliable in terms of reflecting actual registered voters in the state.
Hornik said to certify an election, "you must have accurate rolls, compliance with the law, and the following of procedures as written. Otherwise, you will never be able to attest that the election outcome is accurate and trustworthy."
Hornik went on to explain the importance of righting the wrongs seen in the conduct of elections all over the United States:
"We are in a zero-trust environment with regard to politics and elections. We now must see the data and verify it for ourselves more than ever. We found that the voter roll database has clearly been breached. No one has investigated that or is paying attention. Despite our best efforts, no one has investigated who breached our voter registration database. Did it actually affect elections? We already demonstrated it did. Instead, they continue to go ahead and certify and that is literally a fraud. That was the predicate for one of the lawsuits we were trying to get one of the 2022 candidates to file."
Hornik also emphasized the significance of the breach and/or manipulation of data in the voter roll database. Hornik said:
"The NY State voter rolls are beyond being just a mess. The millions of inaccuracies are contrary to the law in ways that demonstrate the database is being manipulated. We don't know if that means it's being hacked or an inside malicious actor. It is way beyond just dead people voting. If they're being manipulated, that's a national security emergency."
Hornik is launching the group's first lobby day in Albany on Tuesday, Jan. 24. Citizens across the state will "call on legislators to review the group's Deficits Report."
Since 2021 Hornik's army of volunteers has grown from about 50 to over 1100 dedicated volunteers. Hornik has taken care to match each volunteer's various skill sets and strengths with individually meaningful mission-oriented tasks. This kind of care is vital to the long-term retention of volunteers and a real tribute to her leadership and her commitment to the mission of clean and fair elections.
