A longtime signature gatherer will plead guilty to paying homeless people on Skid Row to help get initiatives on the ballot, federal prosecutors said Monday, part of an effort to crack down on what they claim is widespread voter fraud across the state.<\/p>\n
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong,64 of Marina Del Ray, agreed to plead guilty<\/a> to one felony count of paying a person to register to vote, prosecutors announced Monday. She faces up to five years in prison.<\/p>\n Armstrong, who worked for 20 years gathering signatures for ballot initiatives, would give people on Skid Row two to three dollars \u2014 or, sometimes, a cigarette or a phone cord \u2014 in exchange for their signature to help qualify a measure for the ballot, according to her plea agreement. <\/p>\n Skid Row, an area in downtown Los Angeles, has the densest concentration of homeless people in the county. Starting in 2025, Armstrong would also register neighborhood residents to vote, sometimes using her former home address, according to court records.<\/p>\n Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, said they began investigating Armstrong due to a video circulated by James O\u2019Keefe, founder of far-right group Project Veritas, showing people on Skid Row getting paid for their signatures.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce we saw these videos, we went to work,\u201d said Essayli at a news conference announcing the charge. \u201cWe will keep prosecuting and exposing this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n The announcement comes as the federal government seeks to push forward with their lawsuit<\/a> demanding California turn over its voter rolls for an audit. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, calling the request<\/a> \u201cunprecedented and illegal,\u201d and said federal authorities were trying to \u201cabridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots.\u201d Oral arguments in the appeal begin Tuesday.<\/p>\n Essayli said the state should take note of the charges against Armstrong and welcome the audit \u201cwith an open arm.\u201d<\/p>\n Armstrong worked as a \u201cpetition circulator\u201d and was paid to collect signatures to qualify measures for the ballot, according to the plea agreement. Petition circulators are typically paid per signature of registered voter they collect.<\/p>\n Prosecutors also announced<\/a> a hate crime charge Monday for Zaid Gitesatani, 28 of Carlsbad, who they say assaulted a Jewish man during a protest at a Pico Robertson synagogue in June 2024. The protest turned violent with clashes breaking out between pro-Palestinian supporters, who were protesting an event hosted by the synagogue to promote land for sale in Israel<\/a>, and pro-Israel counterprotesters.<\/p>\n Gitesatani is expected to make his initial appearance Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n Kevin Rector contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A longtime signature gatherer will plead guilty to paying homeless people on Skid Row to help get initiatives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[68342,2085,7167,5781,7,134033,14627,4422,48,52,51,1846,47,50,49,16612,1024,47898,6645,225,134034],"class_list":["post-321595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-armstrong","tag-audit","tag-ballot","tag-bill-essayli","tag-california","tag-fed-charge","tag-federal-prosecutor","tag-homeless-people","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lawsuit","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-measure","tag-monday","tag-signature","tag-skid-row","tag-state","tag-zaid-gitesatani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}