Government & Politics

Warning To Voters: Real Election Workers Don’t Make House Calls

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Marly Hornik, Executive Director of New York Citizens Audit, in an upstate TV appearance

September 16, 2023

This story has been updated

By Barrett Seaman–

They show up on your doorstep, asking about your voter registration status. If you have recently moved (which, chances are, they already know), they will ask if you are still registered to vote in your previous location. According to the pro-democracy group Common Cause, they often present themselves as official election workers, “claiming voters are illegally registered to vote after moving, targeting people who have moved from one county to another, claiming that their crime is to be registered in two different counties.”

“In 13 counties across the state,” reports Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause New York, “strangers have knocked on voters’ doors to question the voters about their registration status. Many, but not all, are reported to have been impersonating election officials.”

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While there have not been incidents reported in Westchester to date, the group suspected of organizing this, New York Citizens Audit, has filed papers in the county alleging impropriety in the voting rolls. According to county Democratic Party chair Suzanne Berger, they have appeared at village board meetings in Ardsley and Scarsdale.

It should be noted that not everyone knocking on doors is pretending to be an election worker or implying that voters registered in more than one location are breaking the law. During election season, candidates and their supporters comb through neighborhoods, handing out literature and answering questions, and it’s perfectly legal.

The group implicated in this campaign, New York Citizens Audit, founded in 2021, is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to “Sovereignty Through Honest Provable Elections.” According to the group’s web site, (www.auditny.com), it uses “publicly available voter roll databases obtained directly from state and local boards of elections through the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)“ as a basis for conducting door-to-door audits of those records.

Its Executive Director is Marly Hornik, who has appeared on a number of television interview shows upstate. Among her group’s grievances: onerous taxes, rampant crime, physical attacks on their sovereignty and “transformation of our bountiful farmland into soy fields and solar farms.”

According to their web site, Citizens Audit claims to have “uncovered millions of invalid registrations, hundreds of thousands of votes cast by illegally invalid registrants, massive vote discrepancies and the clear presence of algorithmic patterns we reverse engineered from within the state’s own official records.”

According to Common Cause’s Lerner, by implying that voters registered in two counties are breaking the law, Citizens Audit is engaging in a form of voter suppression. “To be clear,” says Lerner, “it is not a crime to be registered at multiple addresses, as long as the voter casts only one vote. It may just take time for the voter roll to the updated.” Her advice: “Do not share personal information with anyone who shows up at your door. If someone comes to your door claiming to be a public official, ask for identification.” Real election workers, she states, do not make house calls.

Update:

On September 21, the New York State Attorney General’s office issued a “cease and desist” order to New York Citizens Audit, for their alleged tactic of approaching voters at their homes, claiming to be state election officials and falsely accusing them of fraud. In a statement emailed to the Associated Press the groups executive director, MarlyHornik said: “New York Citizens Audit is not engaged in any canvassing, and we have not received this letter as of yet.”

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