A woman who worked as a longtime signature collector for ballot initiatives is set to plead guilty Monday to paying homeless people in Los Angeles\u2019 Skid Row and elsewhere $2 or $3 to register to vote.<\/p>\n
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina del Rey, also known as \u201cAnika,\u201d has agreed to enter a plea to one count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal charge that carries a penalty of up to five years behind bars.<\/p>\n
According to her plea agreement, for nearly 20 years, Armstrong periodically worked as a \u201cpetition circulator.\u201d In that role, she was paid by coordinators to collect voter signatures on official petitions that qualify initiatives, referendums and recalls for California state ballots. Prosecutors said Armstrong drove around the Los Angeles area to find registered voters to sign the petitions.<\/p>\n
After gathering enough signatures, Armstrong returned the petitions to her coordinators, who then paid her a set amount for each registered voter\u2019s signature. The amount she was paid varied depending on the specific ballot initiative. Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered voters, court papers show.<\/p>\n
Armstrong admitted soliciting signatures in Skid Row, a convenient place for the defendant to collect signatures because of its high concentration of people in a relatively small area who were willing to sign petitions in exchange for cash.<\/p>\n
Armstrong regularly paid amounts between $2 and $3 to induce people to sign her petitions, officials said.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said some homeless people did not have an address to put on the forms, so on occasion, Armstrong provided her own former address in Los Angeles to write on the registration form. Such registration forms simultaneously registered an individual to vote in California elections and in federal elections.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not an allegation, this is not a theory, this is an example of admitted voter fraud,\u201d First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said when Armstrong was charged. \u201cWe\u2019re going to aggressively prosecute voter fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n
A video shot by conservative media figure James O\u2019Keefe and reposted by an account called \u201cReal America\u2019s Voice\u201d shows a woman handing cash to a homeless person. In a post on social media, O\u2019Keefe said his video led to Armstrong being charged.<\/p>\n
Essayli said Friday that his office has \u201cmultiple\u201d probes underway into alleged voting fraud. While declining to provide any specifics, he pointed to the Armstrong case as an example of the sort of thing he is investigating.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, there is evidence of election fraud in California,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The comments came one day after President Donald Trump \u2014 without evidence \u2014 publicly accused Democrats of engaging in election fraud in California, pointing to the legally established mail-in voting process.<\/p>\n
Essayli also said his office is working with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon in an effort to audit the state\u2019s voter rolls.<\/p>\n
Essayli said previously that Armstrong\u2019s arrest coincided with arguments in the DOJ\u2019s appeal of the dismissal of a lawsuit over voter registration records.<\/p>\n
The DOJ sued California Secretary of State Shirley Weber last year, demanding the state hand over the unredacted voter file, which includes registered voters\u2019 full names, residential addresses, driver\u2019s license numbers, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.<\/p>\n
The DOJ claimed it had the right to access the data under powers granted by the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Help America Vote Act, and the National Voter Registration Act.<\/p>\n
In January, a Santa Ana federal judge dismissed the case after finding that the DOJ\u2019s request for the information violates federal privacy laws. The defense also argued that the Trump administration wants to use the data to help enforce its immigration policy.<\/p>\n
The DOJ has appealed the dismissal in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman who worked as a longtime signature collector for ballot initiatives is set to plead guilty Monday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4164,48,52,51,42514,47,50,49,143805,592,37540,46049,4486,1557],"class_list":["post-351783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-guilty","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-laco","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-paying","tag-people","tag-plead","tag-skid","tag-vote","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351783","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=351783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}