A Los Angeles woman has been charged with paying homeless individuals to register to vote after being caught on video by the O’Keefe Media Group’s undercover camera. Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong has been charged with “one felony count of paying another person to register to vote,” the DOJ explained.
She has agreed to plead guilty. According to her plea agreement, Armstrong worked as a “petition circulator” for about twenty years. While working in that role, she was paid by “coordinators” to collect voter signatures on petitions for issues to be featured on California state ballots. The DOJ described Skid Row as 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.” She regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash to encourage them to sign the petitions.
Armstrong was also discovered to have used her own former address for a homeless individual’s voter registration.
“False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections – even more so when payoffs are involved,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’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.”
Upon releasing the video in March, investigative journalist James O’Keefe explained that many of the petitioners did not appear to understand the purpose of the petitions, but signed anyway, with the circulators instructing, “Oh, you can just fake an address.” The video showed a petitioner passing money to an individual upon signing a ballot initiative and registering to vote.
