Matt Cohen, senior reporter

Conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley — you know, the guy who became famous for terrorizing Somalian daycares in Minneapolis, which spurred the deadly federal crackdown in the city — is back with his latest video, purporting to uncover voter fraud in California. The problem? His evidence turned out to be false. 

• In Shirley’s latest video, the MAGA YouTuber ventures to different California locations where people are registered to vote, alleging that their voter registrations are fraudulent because they aren’t residential addresses.
  
  
• One such location is a UPS store, where he claims 30 people are registered to vote. But that part of his video was easily debunked, as the address he visited is a mixed-use development, with a UPS store on the ground floor and residential apartments above it.
  
  
• In fact, nearly all of Shirley’s claims of alleged voter fraud are pretty easily debunkable. For example: California law allows unhoused residents to use any location to register to vote, if it’s where they spend most of their time. 
  
  
• MAGA content creators Benny Johnson, David Khait, and Fabian Garcia recently released similar videos claiming to expose voter fraud in California and Georgia. But a Democracy Docket analysis found that, like Shirley’s video, these YouTubers’ claims were fairly easy to debunk.
  
  
• BTW, Vice President JD Vance said Shirley did more for journalism than last year’s Pulitzer winners. And Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber (R) brought Shirley to the State of the Union as his guest.

Another week, another extremely concerning move by Georgia’s MAGA-aligned election board — three of whose five members are election deniers. This time, it voted to hire a private investigator to probe potential election violations.

• The board voted last week — on the same day that President Donald Trump visited Georgia — to launch a pilot project in which Executive Director James Mills will hire a PI to investigate potential election violations and present one to four cases to the board.
  
  
• Board vice chair Janice Johnston — a Trump supporter who has made a slew of false claims about the state’s 2020 election — suggested that the new PI could focus first on voter rolls and list maintenance.
  
  
• It’s an escalation by the board, which already has two independent investigators on staff, but claimed it needed another because it wasn’t satisfied with the way that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s (R) office handled election complaints. 
  
  
• It’s worth reminding that Raffensperger famously certified the 2020 election, over objections from Trump, and found no evidence of voter fraud. The board also voted to subpoena Raffensperger in the wake of the recent Fulton County FBI raid.