Somewhere out there is a person with a great sense of humor and a lot of free time. Fani Willis would very much like to meet them.
The New York City Board of Elections recently flagged a new voter in Manhattan named Fani Willis. According to the paperwork, Willis is a Republican, and she lives at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
The real Fani Willis is the Democratic district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia. She's spent the past three years as one of Donald Trump's most determined legal enemies.
Whoever filled out the form thought of everything. They gave it a made-up birth date and a signature Willis says is forged. For the mailing address, they listed the Fulton County Courthouse, so when election officials got suspicious and mailed out a cancellation notice, it landed right on Willis's desk in Atlanta.
Willis is not amused.
She told an Atlanta TV reporter the episode was "quite upsetting." Asked whether she'd been the victim of a crime, she said, "Absolutely." Then she added, "But this is not the first crime that's been committed to harass me because every time I'm threatened, my house is doxxed — all of those things are crimes."
She now wants the system to take election fraud very seriously on her behalf. Her office is talking to a New York prosecutor about pressing charges.
That would be a first for Willis. Taking election fraud claims seriously never went over well with her.
In August 2023, she indicted Trump and 18 of his allies in a sprawling racketeering case. It treated their challenges to the 2020 election results as a criminal conspiracy. She put together a special grand jury, held press conferences, and hired an outside lawyer named Nathan Wade to run the prosecution. Then the public learned the two had been romantically involved, and the case fell apart.
Willis was taken off it. Peter Skandalakis, the state prosecutor who took over, dropped it last November and summed up the problem in one sentence: "It is not illegal to question or challenge election results."
Several of the counts in her indictment were for forgery and false statements tied to election paperwork. Now someone has forged election paperwork in her name. You couldn't make it up.
Every detail on the fake form works as a joke. Trump Tower is a reminder of who's been living rent-free in her head since 2020. The Republican label is the one party she'd least want next to her name. And sending the notice to her own courthouse meant she'd find out with her morning mail.
It was the wrong name, wrong address, wrong party, and wrong birthday, which made it less a fraudulent registration than a greeting card.
The fake form also shows something the people Willis prosecuted were trying to say about voter rolls. Someone put a fake voter on New York's rolls using a real person's name, a building they don't live in, and a signature that isn't theirs. Officials haven't said how long it stayed there before anyone noticed. New York doesn't ask most voters for photo ID.
The Board of Elections says no ballot was cast under the registration. It canceled the form.
Skandalakis canceled Willis's case, too.
What I fixed: