The naked short sellers are never forced to cover by the SEC so there is no pressure on them to do so. With the removal of the downtick rule, anyone with a accomodating broker can sell naked and simply "pile on" sales dropping the price at no risk and collecting real free cash from the buyers while doing so for no outlay.

It has become a good source of free capital for some brokerages and their connected or associated funds. Any stock where buyers are thin or have limited funds is a good candidate; fundamentals do not matter as long as the naked selelrs can create more selling pressure than there are available buyers to absorb the deluge of "phantom" shares which they dump on the sell side.

The actual number of short sales reported do not necessarily include the naked short sales. Those numbers reported by the exchanges are compiled from figures supplied by the brokerages and the DTCC. Naked sales do not go though the DTCC and brokers selling naked don't always report the sales as short sales or they simply don't know.

The official short figures do include shares legally borrowed and sold short but do not necessarily include stock sold naked and not borrowed. As a result the real short position is the sum of the fails to deliver plus the reported shorts from borrowed stock which is of course delivered at settlement just like long sales.

Unfortunately the very slow reporting of all short interest and fails (a deliberate ploy by the SEC IMO) keeps the real short trading position hidden from the investing public so in this way the SEC hides and aids the manipulators.