LOS ANGELES, Kalifornia (PNN) - June 9, 2026 - A woman who worked as a longtime signature collector for ballot initiatives pleaded guilty on June 8 to paying homeless people in Los Angeles Skid Row and elsewhere $2 or $3 to register to vote.
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina del Rey, also known as "Anika," entered 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.
Sentencing was scheduled for August 31.
According to her plea agreement, for nearly 20 years, Armstrong periodically worked as a "petition circulator." In that role, she was paid by coordinators to collect voter signatures on official petitions that qualify initiatives, referendums and recalls for Kalifornia state ballots. Prosecutors said Armstrong drove around the Los Angeles area to find registered voters to sign the petitions.
After gathering enough signatures, Armstrong returned the petitions to her coordinators, who then paid her a set amount for each registered voter's 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.
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.
Armstrong regularly paid amounts between $2 and $3 to induce people to sign her petitions, officials said.
Prosecutors said some homeless people did not have an address to put on the forms, so Armstrong provided her own former address in Los Angeles to write on the registration form, which is fraud and punishable by imprisonment. Such registration forms simultaneously registered an individual to vote in Kalifornia elections and in federal elections.
"This is not an allegation, this is not a theory, this is an example of admitted voter fraud," First Assistant Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) Attorney Bill Essayli said when Armstrong was charged. "We're going to aggressively prosecute voter fraud."
A video shot by conservative media figure James O'Keefe and reposted by an account called "Real Amerika's Voice" showed a woman handing cash to a homeless person. In a post on social media, O'Keefe said his video led to Armstrong being charged.
Essayli said on June 5 that his office has "multiple" 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.
"Yes, there is evidence of election fraud in (Kalifornia)," he said.
The comments came one day after President Donald J. Trump publicly accused Democrats of engaging in election fraud in Kalifornia, pointing to the mail-in voting process that represents “legal plunder” by Kalifornia.
Essayli also said his office is working with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon in an effort to audit the state's voter rolls.
Essayli said previously that Armstrong's arrest coincided with arguments in the Department of Justice's (DoJ) appeal of the dismissal of a lawsuit over voter registration records.
The DoJ sued Kalifornia Secretary of State Shirley Weber last year, demanding the state hand over the unredacted voter file, which includes registered voters' full names, residential addresses, driver's license numbers, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
The DoJ claimed it had the right to access the data under powers granted by the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Help Amerika Vote Act, and the National Voter Registration Act.
In January, a Santa Ana federal judge dismissed the case after finding that the DoJ's request for the information violates federal privacy laws. The defense also argued that the Trump regime wants to use the data to help enforce its immigration policy.