A longtime California ballot petition worker has agreed to plead guilty to a federal charge after prosecutors said she paid people in downtown Los Angeles, including homeless individuals, to complete voter registration forms that also registered them to vote in federal elections.
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina del Rey, California, also known as “Anika,” was charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, according to the Department of Justice. The charge carries a statutory maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.
Prosecutors said that on January 30, Armstrong “knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote” as part of the scheme, and did so for the purpose of causing that person to register for federal elections.
The DOJ said Armstrong has agreed to plead guilty and was scheduled to make her initial appearance Monday morning, May 18, in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana. She is expected to plead guilty in the coming weeks.
According to her plea agreement, Armstrong periodically worked for approximately 20 years as a petition circulator. In that role, she was paid by individuals and entities known as “coordinators” to collect voter signatures on official petitions used to qualify initiatives, referendums, and recalls for California state ballots.
The DOJ said Armstrong drove around the Los Angeles area to find registered voters to sign petitions. After collecting signatures, she returned the petitions to coordinators, who paid her “a set amount for each registered voter’s signature.” The amount varied depending on the ballot initiative.
Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, prosecutors said Armstrong sought to ensure the people signing her petitions were registered. The DOJ said she sometimes solicited signatures in skid row, described in the release as “an area of downtown Los Angeles notorious for its homelessness problem.”
According to prosecutors, skid row was a convenient place for Armstrong to collect signatures because of its “high concentration of people in a relatively small area” who were willing to sign petitions in exchange for payment. The DOJ said Armstrong “regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3,” to induce them to sign her petitions.
Prosecutors said many people in skid row’s homeless population were not registered to vote. The DOJ said that, “to ensure she maximized her pay from her coordinators,” Armstrong, starting no later than 2025, began offering payment to individuals not only to sign her petitions, but also to complete a voter registration form. Prosecutors said she gathered voter registration forms from the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters before going to Skid Row.
The DOJ said some homeless individuals did not have an address to put on the forms. “On several occasions,” prosecutors said, Armstrong provided a homeless individual with her own former address in Los Angeles “so they had something to write on the registration form.”
“These registration forms simultaneously registered an individual to vote in California elections and in federal elections,” the DOJ said.
The release said California “automatically sends a vote-by-mail ballot to every registered voter,” meaning ballots in some homeless individuals’ names could have had “the potential to be sent to Armstrong’s former residence where the homeless individual did not live or collect mail.”
“False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections – even more so when payoffs are involved,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said. “This Justice Department is committed to ensuring that all U.S. elections are fair and free from illegal meddling – so that all Americans can accept the results with confidence.”
In November 2018, the Los Angeles County District Attorney announced that nine people had been charged with a dozen felony counts for allegedly offering money and cigarettes to homeless people on skid row in exchange for false or forged signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.
Prosecutors said the charges included circulating a petition with false names, using false names on a petition, registering a fictitious person, and registering a nonexistent person. Breitbart News noted at the time that it was not clear the alleged scheme affected any election outcomes.
In August 2020, Breitbart News reported on a New York Post account of a Democrat operative who alleged mail-in voting fraud tactics including fake ballots, paying homeless voters, taking advantage of elderly voters, and impersonating inactive voters. The operative claimed, “This is a real thing,” and said his crew paid homeless voters in shelters about $50 to $60 to vote for Democrat candidates. The report also cited election-related cases involving Paterson, New Jersey, a former Pennsylvania judge, duplicate Pennsylvania mail-in ballots, and more than 223,000 undeliverable mail-in ballots in Las Vegas during Nevada’s June 2020 primary.
In November 2020, Carlos Antonio De Bourbon Montenegro and Marcos Raul Arevalo were charged with multiple counts of voter fraud after allegedly submitting fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors alleged Montenegro submitted more than 8,000 fraudulent voter registration applications between July and October 2020 and also falsified “names, addresses and signatures on nomination papers under penalty of perjury to run for mayor in the city of Hawthorne.” Montenegro faced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, while Arevalo faced up to seven years, and the matter remained under investigation at the time.
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