On Camera, for Pocket Change: Homeless Angelenos Say They Were Paid to Vote for Bass and Raman.

One day after a petition circulator pleaded guilty in federal court to buying voter registrations on Skid Row for $2 a signature, a new set of on-camera claims landed: homeless Angelenos telling an interviewer they were paid — $2, $4, $5 — to mail in ballots for Mayor Karen Bass (D) and Councilmember Nithya Raman (D), the two Democrats now headed to a November runoff for mayor of Los Angeles.

The footage, recorded Tuesday morning near 7th and Flower downtown and first reported by the New York Post’s California desk, has been handed to the Department of Justice — which says it already has “multiple election fraud investigations underway” in California. Neither the Bass nor the Raman campaign responded to the Post’s requests for comment, and no one has identified who allegedly handed out the cash.

A caution up front, because this site traffics in receipts: these are unverified allegation-stage claims. The Post itself said it could not independently verify them, and within a day, county records had already knocked one of the five claimants’ stories down. What is verified is the ecosystem around the claims — a guilty plea, undercover tapes, roughly 7,600 voters registered at homeless shelters, and a federal prosecutor circling all of it.

• $2–$5 — what five people on camera say they were paid to vote — one negotiated up from $2 to $4 · Source: NY Post / The California Post
• 1 guilty plea — Brenda Armstrong, June 8 — paying people on Skid Row $2–$3 per voter registration; sentencing Aug. 31 · Source: DOJ, KESQ
• ~7,600 — voters registered at LA homeless shelters and service providers — 1,160 at a mission with 120 beds · Source: NY Post via Hannity.com
• 1 claim debunked — the woman who said she got $5 to vote for Bass is registered in Inglewood — and never returned her ballot · Source: Lead Stories, LA County Registrar

The videos went up Tuesday on a pro–Spencer Pratt TikTok account — a detail worth knowing, since Pratt (R) is the candidate the late mail-ballot count just eliminated from the runoff. In them, Kevin Shepherd says he was offered $2 to vote for Bass and negotiated it to $4, completed a mail-in ballot, and dropped it in a ballot box. Asked whether the canvassers would have paid him to vote for Raman instead, he answered: “They gave you an optional choice.” Mark Sanchez said he’d been approached repeatedly — “$4 or $5 in different accounts… It happened more than four or five times.” A third woman said she took $2: “Yeah, they come out here all the time.”

Don Garza, a disabled veteran who has lived on Skid Row since 1999, gave the quote that frames the story from the inside: residents are tired of outsiders “deciding elections and taking advantage of us.” Whoever was handing out bills — and that is the open question, because no payer has been identified and nothing ties the payments to either campaign — the people describing it talk about it as a routine of life downtown, not a one-time scheme.

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Now the other side of the ledger, stated as plainly as the allegations. The Post “was unable to independently verify the claims made in the videos.” The interviews were recorded near 7th and Flower — the financial district, about a mile west of Skid Row proper. And the most quotable claim collapsed fastest: Rene Johnson, 39, who said on camera she received $5 after being told to vote for Bass (“I was just trying to make five bucks, you know? But I didn’t do the fraud”), is identified in county records as Shanekka Renee Johnson — registered to vote in Inglewood, a separate city with its own mayor, who never returned the primary ballot mailed to her address. Lead Stories, working from LA County Registrar records, rated her claim flatly false.

One debunked claim does not erase the other four, but it calibrates them: an on-camera statement from a stranger downtown is the start of a story, not the end of one. That is precisely why the footage going to the DOJ matters more than the footage going viral — investigators can pull ballot records, canvasser payrolls, and drop-box footage. A TikTok account supporting the eliminated candidate cannot.

“I was just trying to make five bucks, you know? But I didn't do the fraud.”

Woman identifying herself as Rene Johnson · NY Post video, June 9, 2026 — registrar records show she never returned a ballot

What gives the new claims their gravity is the case that just ended in a conviction one day earlier. On Monday, June 8, Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64 — a paid petition circulator known on Skid Row as “Anika,” with roughly twenty years in the trade — pleaded guilty to a federal felony count of paying people to register to vote. Prosecutors said she paid homeless residents $2 to $3 per signature and, on several occasions, instructed them to write her own former Los Angeles address on the forms. Her case began with a James O’Keefe undercover video in March; her sentencing is set for August 31. We covered the charge when it landed in May — the “pocket change” case — and her plea converts it from allegation to fact.

The legal distinction between the two stories is real: Armstrong admitted paying people to register; the new videos allege paying people to vote, for named candidates— a more serious species of federal crime, and one no charge yet alleges. No public evidence connects Armstrong to the new claims. But the business model the tapes describe is identical: a few dollars, a clipboard, the same blocks, year after year. O’Keefe’s tapes captured 28 instances of cash or drugs traded for registrations, with circulators paid $7 to $10 a signature — up to $1,000 a day — and one explaining, “You can just fake an address… You can just put Pinocchio Lane.”

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The same day the videos surfaced, the Post published a companion records review that needs no eyewitness at all: roughly 7,600 voters are registered at Los Angeles homeless shelters and service providers. The Midnight Mission on Skid Row — capacity 84 men and 36 women — carries 1,160 registered voters at its address. St. Joseph Center in Venice, which has no overnight beds, carries 185. Federal investigators are reportedly examining the rolls.

The St. Joseph Center detail reaches Raman directly: the organization received $600,000 in city funds while Raman (D), a Democratic Socialists of America member, chaired the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee — and a photo of Raman presenting the group a ceremonial check was removed from its website after the Post’s inquiries. None of that is a crime; registering to vote at a shelter address is legal for homeless voters, and service providers routinely run registration drives. But a shelter with 120 beds carrying 1,160 registrations is the kind of number an auditor — or a federal grand jury — exists to explain.

U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (R), the Trump appointee for the Central District of California, announced on June 5 that his office has “multiple election fraud investigations underway” and would “follow the evidence wherever it leads.” An assistant U.S. attorney toured the county’s ballot-processing center that Friday; Essayli is also working with DOJ Civil Rights chief Harmeet Dhillon (R) on what they describe as a comprehensive audit of California’s voter rolls — an audit the state is fighting at the Ninth Circuit. State Attorney General Rob Bonta (D)answered that his office “has a presence on the ground” and “stands ready to protect voters.”

Worth noting, because it cuts against the narrative convenient to either side: Essayli’s office has also debunked one viral fraud claim about this election — the assertion that one candidate received zero votes in a count update. “We reviewed official county records. The claim is false,” his office said. A prosecutor willing to knock down a bad fraud claim is more credible when he says other investigations are real. President Donald Trump (R), meanwhile, has spent the week declaring the count itself crooked — claims that remain, like the videos, unproven.

Strip the noise and three things are simultaneously true. First: paying people to register on Skid Row is now a federally admitted crime — Armstrong pleaded guilty to exactly that, this week. Second: paying people to vote for named candidatesis, so far, an on-camera allegation with no charge, no identified payer, no verified payment, and one debunked claimant. Third: the structural facts — 7,600 shelter registrations, a 120-bed mission carrying 1,160 voters, an admitted twenty-year cash-for-signatures trade — sit in the public record regardless of what becomes of the videos.

The people with the least in Los Angeles are describing themselves as the cheapest line item in its politics — a few dollars a ballot, election after election. Whether a jury ever agrees, the residents themselves already rendered Garza’s verdict: they are tired of being the raw material. We will update this page as the DOJ investigations develop and as the Bass–Raman runoff approaches.

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Last updated June 10, 2026