Letitia James Sued for Election Retaliation
.
Citizen Auditors Sue NY AG Letitia James, Allege ‘Lawfare’ and Cover-Up of Massive Election Fraud
ALBANY, NY – In a legal and political bombshell that has reverberated through alternative media circles while remaining largely absent from mainstream headlines, a civic watchdog group has filed an explosive 52-page civil rights complaint against New York Attorney General Letitia James and the State Board of Elections. The group, New York Citizens Audit (NYCA), led by researcher Marly Hornik, accuses the state’s top law enforcement officer and election officials of engaging in a “conspiracy against civil rights” by weaponizing state power to suppress, intimidate, and defame citizens who uncovered what they describe as millions of irregularities and evidence of potential felony misconduct within New York’s official voter registration system.
Filed on October 16, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, the lawsuit alleges that when NYCA volunteers presented state officials with hard evidence of systemic flaws in the voter rolls—including millions of invalid registration records and hundreds of thousands more votes cast than voters recorded—they were met not with transparency or investigation, but with a coordinated campaign of retaliation. This campaign, the complaint asserts, culminated in Attorney General James launching a criminal probe into the citizen auditors under the Ku Klux Klan Act, a move the group decries as a classic example of “lawfare” designed to silence dissent and chill public scrutiny of election integrity.
The lawsuit seeks not only damages for the alleged violation of the group’s First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights but also a court order mandating a comprehensive, external, bonded, and certified audit of New York’s entire election process, “from registration through certification.” As the case begins its journey through the federal court system, it poses fundamental questions about the right of citizens to petition their government, the boundaries of free speech, and whether state power is being used to protect democracy or to punish those who dare to question it.
A Pandora’s Box of Data: The Alleged Irregularities
At the heart of NYCA’s complaint is a trove of data anomalies the group claims to have discovered within NYS Voter, the state’s official voter database. Over a period of extensive research, volunteers for the organization, described as a non-partisan collection of data analysts, retirees, and concerned citizens, conducted a deep dive into the state’s publicly available election records. The findings, detailed at length in the lawsuit, paint a picture of a system riddled with what they term “massive irregularities.”
According to the filing, the audit uncovered:
Over 1.5 million duplicate voter ID numbers within the NYS Voter database, creating the potential for individuals to be registered multiple times.
An even more startling 2 million “extra” voter ID numbers that do not correspond to any registered voter, which the group suggests could be used to generate phantom ballots.
A discrepancy of approximately 436,000 more votes than voters recorded as having participated in the elections between 2020 and 2024, a figure that raises immediate questions about ballot chain of custody and accounting.
Widespread evidence of what the lawsuit calls “facially invalid registration records,” totaling a staggering 29 million examples across multiple states in a broader national audit. In New York, this included voters registered before they were born, some with birthdates in the 1800s, and others listed as being over the age of 114.
Signs of what the group’s experts believe to be algorithmic manipulation within the data, suggesting that the irregularities may not be random errors but part of a systemic issue.
Alleged violations of federal law, which requires the preservation of election records for 22 months. The lawsuit claims that some New York election officials admitted to NYCA researchers that records from the 2020 election had been overwritten, a direct contravention of federal statute.
“We identified inside of the state’s official records about the 2022 and 2020 elections millions and millions of examples of what appear to be felony misconduct,” Marly Hornik stated in an interview. She emphasized that the data used for the audit was not the group’s own but was sourced directly from the state. “It was their data,” Hornik explained. “We had simply extracted the problems from it and returned them the problems to resolve line by line. It’s not my fault that there were 5 million problems. It’s their fault.”
The group contends that these findings, which align with the U.S. Department of Justice’s own guidelines for prosecuting election offenses, should have triggered an immediate and thorough investigation by state authorities. Instead, they allege the response was a coordinated effort to attack the messengers.
Retaliation and “Lawfare”: The State Strikes Back
The lawsuit meticulously documents a sequence of events that NYCA argues constitutes a conspiracy to violate their civil rights. After the group began presenting its findings at local town board and county legislature meetings across the state, from Montauk to Buffalo, they claim the pushback from official channels began.
First, the New York State Board of Elections allegedly circulated a statewide memo to local officials. Rather than addressing the data presented, the memo branded the NYCA volunteers as “bad actors,” “malicious,” “liars,” and “deceivers” who were spreading “misinformation.” According to Hornik, this memo was used by local boards to preemptively dismiss the group’s presentations. “The town board would just hold up these letters that they had gotten from the state board of elections and say, ‘Well, you know, we already know about you guys. We don’t have to listen to you because we already know all about you,’” she recounted.
The situation escalated dramatically when Attorney General Letitia James’s office intervened. In what the lawsuit calls a “clear media ambush,” James’s office sent a cease-and-desist letter to NYCA, accusing the group of impersonating election officials and intimidating voters—claims Hornik and the lawsuit vehemently deny as “completely fabricated.” The letter was leaked to the press and became front-page news across New York before NYCA had even officially received it, cementing a public narrative that portrayed the citizen auditors as a threat.
Most alarmingly for the group, the Attorney General’s office reportedly launched a criminal investigation into their activities under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. This Reconstruction-era law was originally designed to prosecute members of the KKK for intimidating black voters. The lawsuit highlights the profound irony of using a statute intended to protect civil rights to investigate a group of “retirees and data analysts” for exercising their First Amendment right to question their government.
“This is classic lawfare,” the video’s narrator, Nelly Miranda, commented. “The use of state power to intimidate dissent. You question the system, they brand you as a threat to democracy.”
The lawsuit argues that this multi-pronged attack—combining official condemnation, a media smear campaign, and the threat of criminal prosecution—was a deliberate and unconstitutional effort to silence NYCA and prevent their findings from gaining public traction.
A Constitutional Showdown: First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments
NYCA’s legal action is grounded in a robust constitutional argument, citing violations of three key amendments.
The First Amendment: The lawsuit contends that the state’s actions represent a direct assault on the group’s right to free speech and, crucially, their right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” NYCA argues that when citizens uncover potential government misconduct and present it to their elected officials, the correct response is engagement, not defamation and investigation. By branding them as criminals for their inquiries, the state has, in effect, nullified this fundamental right.
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments: The group also claims a violation of their due process and equal protection rights. By publicly smearing them and launching a baseless investigation without due process, the state allegedly damaged their reputations and subjected them to unequal treatment under the law. They argue that they were targeted not for any illegal act, but for the political inconvenience of their message.
The complaint’s central thesis is that if citizens cannot raise legitimate concerns about election integrity without being threatened with criminal charges, then the very concept of representative government becomes a “facade.” The case aims to draw a clear line between legitimate government oversight and unconstitutional political censorship, asking the court to affirm that citizen auditing is a protected form of speech and petition.
A National Pattern of Political Weaponization?
The lawsuit and the commentary surrounding it seek to frame the conflict as more than an isolated New York issue. They present it as a prime example of a broader national trend where, they allege, Democrat Attorneys General are increasingly using the power of their offices as political weapons against their ideological opponents.
The video report accompanying the lawsuit’s announcement points to Letitia James’s own history, citing her numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration and her high-profile civil suits against Republican figures and Christian groups. It includes a clip of James speaking after the 2016 presidential election, where she vowed to resist the incoming administration. “We will not compromise our values or our integrity or our principles,” James said at the time. “We use the rule of law to fight back. And we are prepared to fight back once again.”
Proponents of the lawsuit argue that this statement reveals a pre-existing mindset to use her office for political combat, and that her actions against NYCA are a natural extension of that philosophy. “She has made it her mission to undermine them,” the narrator states, arguing that James is now “targeting ordinary citizens who dare to audit elections, all while screaming that she’s a protector of democracy.”
The complaint also names U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in the context of a wider effort, noting that Hornik’s affiliated groups have filed federal lawsuits in nine states against chief election officials and attorneys general. The overarching concern is that a pattern of official resistance to election transparency is endangering the “fundamental right of American citizens to choose representatives.”
The Sound of Silence: Media Coverage and the Narrative War
A recurring and forceful theme in the story’s telling is the conspicuous lack of coverage from major media outlets. “Today’s story, you will not see it blasted across CNN or MSNBC,” Miranda began her report. She later noted, “Not a single New York Times headline, no CNN segment because the narrative, it just doesn’t fit. I literally found this on X.”
This perceived media blackout is central to the narrative being advanced by NYCA and its supporters. They argue that the silence is not an oversight but a deliberate choice to protect a political establishment that is hostile to questions about election integrity. By ignoring the 52-page complaint and its detailed allegations, they contend, the media is failing in its duty to inform the public and is instead acting as a gatekeeper for an approved narrative.
At its core, this aspect of the story transforms the lawsuit into a battle over information itself. The case is not just being tried in a court of law but in the court of public opinion, where the ability to get a story heard is the first and most critical hurdle.
Conclusion: A Litmus Test for Freedom
As New York Citizens Audit v. James prepares to move forward, it represents far more than a dry legal dispute over voter data. It is a litmus test for some of the most pressing issues in modern American civic life: the integrity of elections, the freedom of speech, and the immense power of state officials to either foster or crush public accountability.
The court will be asked to weigh the state’s interest in combating what it deems “misinformation” against the constitutional rights of citizens to scrutinize and criticize their government. If the court rules that Letitia James and the Board of Elections overstepped their authority, it could send a powerful message across the country, emboldening citizen audit groups and redrawing the boundaries between permissible government oversight and illegal political censorship. If the case is dismissed, it could have a profound chilling effect, discouraging future efforts to hold election officials accountable.
For Marly Hornik and the volunteers of NYCA, the fight is existential. “If we don’t have legitimate representative government, we don’t have a country,” she declared. “So, we have to fight this all the way down to the mat with these people.” Whether that fight leads to a landmark victory for citizen oversight or a cautionary tale about the perils of challenging state power remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: the questions raised by this lawsuit will not be easily dismissed.
