An exclusive report from The New York Post details how homeless residents in Los Angeles were paid to vote specifically for Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Nithya Raman.
Videos obtained by The California Post, originally published by the TikTok account LaneNeedsSpencerPratt, show homeless people stating they were paid $4 dollars to vote for the Democratic candidates.
When asked if he was paid to vote for a candidate, a man named Kevin Shepherd said, “They gave you an optional choice.” He explained he was offered $2 but negotiated for $4 dollars. Spencer Pratt was not among the candidates he was urged to support.
Another homeless resident, Rene Johnson, said she received $5 after being told to vote for Bass. While she supported Bass, she said she did not fully understand the forms she had completed. “But, you know, at the time, I didn’t know that that was going on,” Johnson said, discussing fraud. “I was just trying to make five bucks, you know? But I didn’t do the fraud.”
Yet another homeless resident said she received “like two bucks” and that people offering the cash “come out here all the time.”
A disabled military veteran to lives on Skid Row, Don Garza, said, “We are tired of it. We don’t want people coming in and deciding elections and taking advantage of us.”
“Every one of them thinks they have claim to our voice,” he said. “They think they speak for us.”
Last month, Los Angeles woman was 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.
