Federal prosecutors have charged three people in connection with an alleged scheme to pay homeless residents on Los Angeles’s Skid Row to sign California ballot petitions using stolen identities of registered voters.
James Brass, 47, of Victorville, was arrested Thursday on a federal indictment charging him with orchestrating the scheme. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli’s office announced the arrest, saying Brass paid people on Skid Row to sign initiative petitions using the identities of registered voters who had no connection to the signers.
Two petition circulators who worked for Brass were also charged: Courtney Price, 49, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Jateisha Herron, 33, of Boron, California.
All three defendants face one count of conspiracy to commit identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony. Brass and Price face an additional count of identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony.
Brass was expected to make his initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Riverside on Thursday afternoon.
The indictment follows earlier reporting from May, when OMG Media’s James O’Keefe and Turning Point USA’s Savanah Hernandez documented petition circulators on Skid Row offering cash, cigarettes and marijuana in exchange for signatures on California ballot petitions. According to that reporting, canvassers who were themselves being paid then paid signers, who used identities drawn from voter registration records without knowing what they were signing.
Paying someone to register to vote or sign a ballot petition is a crime under California law, as is using a false identity to do so.
The Skid Row case is not the first of its kind to surface in Los Angeles. In May, a Los Angeles woman named Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong agreed to a plea deal in which she admitted paying homeless people to register to vote in federal elections.
Signature gathering has become a significant business in California, where ballot initiatives must collect hundreds of thousands of valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. One high-profile example is Proposition 40, a proposed wealth tax targeting individuals worth over a billion dollars, which qualified for the June ballot. There is no allegation that fraud was involved in gathering signatures for that measure; it is cited only to illustrate the scale of signature-gathering efforts tied to major initiatives.
The case against Brass, Price and Herron remains at the indictment stage, meaning the charges are allegations that must be proven in court.
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