Federal prosecutors have charged three California residents for allegedly scamming the state’s referendum system by paying homeless people to pose as other voters, then sign petitions to try to get measures on the ballot.
James Brass, who went by the nickname Lord, is accused of being the mastermind, and Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron are charged with being accomplices in the scam.
They culled valid voter names from the state’s registration database, then took those names to Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where they offered payments to homeless people in exchange for them pretending to be the valid voters when signing a petition, according to a federal indictment handed up on Wednesday.
Mr. Brass, 47, and Ms. Herron, 33, would then sign the forms affirming that they witnessed a valid voter, and those petitions would then be counted.
“As defendants Brass and Herron knew, their false representations regarding the authenticity of the signatures would result in false and fraudulent signatures being counted in connection with the effort to place the initiative at issue on the ballot,” the indictment charges.
For a referendum to qualify for the ballot in California requires a major effort, with the signature count based on total turnout in past elections. To get an initiative on this year’s ballot required nearly 550,000 valid signatures, and to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot required nearly 875,000.
Petition backers usually hire professional signature management firms to do the lifting. Those firms then contract with signature gatherers.
“These defendants are charged with using stolen identities of registered voters to manufacture signatures on ballot petitions used to shape California law. They allegedly used people, including members of Skid Row’s vulnerable homeless population, to try to cover up their tracks,” said Bill Essayli, who is acting as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.
Authorities said Mr. Brass earned $41,600 in payments from backers of the petition drives he worked on.
They focused on low-income neighborhoods around the Los Angeles area, including Skid Row in the city’s downtown.
But Mr. Brass seemed anxious to hide the locations of the signatures.
“Never ever say down town[sic] LA,” he told Ms. Herron, according to the indictment.
The case is the second one this year to allege that California petition-gatherers abused Skid Row.
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong was charged and pleaded guilty in May, and was sentenced this month to 18 months on probation.
She said she paid a few dollars per signature, and also gave out cigarettes and phone cords as incentives.
It turned out that many of Skid Row’s inhabitants weren’t valid California voters, so Ms. Brown Armstrong brought her own voter registration forms to sign up the homeless. She allowed some of them to use her own address as their home locations on the forms.
California automatically mails ballots to every registered voter, meaning Ms. Brown Armstrong ended up with the homeless people’s ballots.
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