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.

Keep Reading

Society · TDS Watch

A GOP Senator Says a Departing Biden Team Tried to Trap Trump in Years of TPS Lawsuits. The Supreme Court Already Blew It Up.

Read →

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.”

Keep Reading

Society · Elections

Alaska Sent 3,048 Voters a Letter Asking Them to Prove They're Citizens. Now It's Being Sued for How It Got Their Data.

Read →

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.

Here is the context the viral clips lack and the reflexive denials skip past. The Skid Row claims are not landing in a vacuum — they are the newest entry in a documented, prosecuted California record that long predates this mayor’s race. The Heritage Foundation’s election-fraud database catalogs roughly seventy California convictions over three decades; that is not “mass fraud,” and we will not pretend it is. But it is not zero either, and the specific cases below all ended in charges, pleas, or sentences in the public record. We list them because the same playbook — paid registrations, harvested mail ballots, ballots mailed to people who do not exist — keeps reappearing, and because one of them answers the oldest question about California’s rolls directly: yes, the ballots keep coming even after the “voter” is exposed.

• Maya the dog voted — and kept getting ballots after she died. Laura Lee Yourex, 62, of Costa Mesa registered her dog, “Maya Jean Yourex,” as a voter. The dog’s mail-in ballot was counted in the 2021 gubernatorial recall and rejected in the 2022 primary. Yourex says she did it to expose how easily the system can be gamed — and the system proved her point: even after Maya died, an October 2024 post showed the dog’s tag beside a fresh vote-by-mail ballot, captioned “Maya is still getting her ballot.” The Orange County DA charged Yourex in September 2025 with five felonies, including perjury, casting a ballot when not entitled to vote, and registering a non-existent person to vote. Source: Orange County District Attorney; Newsweek
• Nine charged in the original Skid Row cash-and-cigarettes scheme. In November 2018, the LA County DA charged nine people with a dozen felony counts for paying homeless residents on Skid Row with cash and cigarettes to sign false names on ballot petitions and voter-registration forms across the 2016 and 2018 cycles. Ringleader Norman Hall, 62, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail plus probation. It is the same blocks, the same victims, and nearly the same price as the 2026 Armstrong plea — eight years apart. Source: Los Angeles County District Attorney; NBC News
• A Lodi councilman won his seat on harvested ballots. Shakir Khan won a 2020 Lodi City Council seat by 282 votes. A San Joaquin County sheriff’s search of his home turned up 41 sealed, completed mail-in ballots; a citizen reviewing the rolls found 71 names registered to Khan’s own address, phone, or email. He resigned and, in March 2026, was sentenced to three years after pleading no contest to a stack of felonies including voter fraud. An entire municipal election, decided by a few hundred votes, rested on ballots one man controlled. Source: Lodi News-Sentinel; Heritage Foundation case #201456
• A man voted twice in two elections — by mail and in person. William Eschenbach voted by absentee ballot and again in person on Election Day in both the June 2022 primary and the November 2022 general, then bragged online that he did it to prove how insecure mail voting is. He pleaded guilty and drew probation, 40 hours of community service, and $500 in restitution — a small case that quietly confirms the same-person, two-ballots loophole is real, not theoretical. Source: Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database (California)
• Brenda Armstrong: the 20-year cash-for-signatures trade, admitted in court. The guilty plea at the center of this week’s story is itself a historical case. Armstrong, 64, told a federal judge she spent roughly two decades as a paid Skid Row petition circulator and, by 2025, was paying homeless residents $2–$3 apiece to register — sometimes handing them her own old LA address to write down. Her plea is the throughline connecting the 2018 nine-defendant case to the 2026 “paid-to-vote” videos: a continuous, professionalized trade in the registrations of people with nothing. Source: U.S. DOJ; KESQ

Read together, the pattern is the point. Individually, each is a single prosecuted defendant; collectively, they describe a recurring method — target the poorest and most invisible voters, monetize their registrations, and rely on a rolls system that mails ballots faster than it removes bad entries. That is the soil the new Skid Row allegations grew in, and it is why a federal prosecutor is looking at the rolls rather than waving the claims away.

Keep Reading

Society · DEI Governance

The Federal Government Wants to Stop Collecting Your Employer's Race Data. Here's What a Proposed Rule Would Actually Change.

Read →

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 candidates is, 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.

More From Civic Intelligence

Society · TDS Watch

A USA Today Columnist Compared Fouls Against Caitlin Clark to the Lynching of Emmett Till. She Walked It Back Within Hours.

Nancy Armour's July 22 column argued a 'white nationalist element' in Clark's fanbase echoes the…

Society · Crime Problem

Minnesota's Assassin Gets Two Life Sentences Plus 40 Years. His State Murder Trial Hasn't Even Started.

Vance Boelter was sentenced July 23 to two consecutive life terms plus 40 years, no parole, for…

Last updated June 10, 2026