For years, anyone who dared question the integrity of the election process was treated as some conspiracy nut. We were told election fraud was virtually nonexistent, that safeguards were more than adequate, and that demanding tighter controls was somehow an attack on democracy. Well, take a walk through Skid Row in Los Angeles and explain this one. Federal prosecutors have now charged three people in an alleged operation that paid people on Skid Row to sign California ballot petitions using the stolen identities of registered voters.
They pulled the identities of actual registered voters from a database, handed those identities to people on the street, paid them to copy the information onto petitions, and had them forge the corresponding signatures. That is precisely the type of manipulation we were repeatedly assured should not concern us.
James Brass, known as “Lord,” has been arrested and charged along with Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron. Prosecutors say the operation ran from February through August 2026. Brass allegedly received approximately $41,600 from coordinators associated with one petition-management company, while false declarations were signed claiming the circulators had personally witnessed the supposed registered voters signing the petitions.
Skid Row contains some of the most vulnerable people in America. Homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction are everywhere. Earlier reporting from undercover investigations described people being offered cash, cigarettes and marijuana for petition signatures.
And this is not even the first federal case to emerge from Skid Row this year. Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong (no relation) agreed to plead guilty after admitting that she paid people, including homeless individuals, to register to vote. She normally received money for petition signatures only when the signer was a registered voter, so prosecutors say she began offering people money to complete voter registration forms as well. Some homeless people had no address, so she supplied her own former Los Angeles address for them to use. California automatically mails ballots to registered voters, meaning ballots associated with some of those registrations potentially could have been sent to an address where those individuals did not live or receive mail. How many warning signs does government require before admitting that vulnerabilities exist?
What particularly infuriates me is the exploitation of the homeless. Politicians parade around pretending they care about these people while Los Angeles has allowed human misery to become part of the landscape. Then along comes a political signature industry where every valid signature has monetary value. Suddenly the homeless person is valuable, not because anybody intends to get him off the street, treat his addiction or restore his dignity, but because his hand can produce a signature worth money. That is how sick politics has become.
There is a financial incentive behind this entire petition business. California requires hundreds of thousands of signatures to qualify statewide initiatives, creating an industry in which petition management companies pay circulators and signatures themselves acquire economic value. Once government creates a system where political access is measured by hundreds of thousands of signatures and each signature can generate money for somebody in the chain, do not act shocked when people attempt to game it.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said the defendants allegedly used members of Skid Row’s vulnerable homeless population to “cover up their tracks.” This is why identification and verification should never have become partisan issues. If someone tells me that requiring safeguards somehow “suppresses democracy,” I ask the obvious question: whose democracy are we protecting?
We have created a society where government knows virtually everything about YOU. Flock cameras can track your automobile. Banks report your transactions. Your phone knows where you sleep. The IRS knows what you earn. Government databases know where you live. Yet somehow when it comes to protecting the political process, asking that identity actually be verified becomes controversial. They can track an ordinary citizen across a city with cameras, but ensuring that one human being corresponds to one legitimate political identity is suddenly an unbearable burden.
Enough. We are destroying confidence in our institutions because politicians refuse to acknowledge weaknesses until federal prosecutors put somebody in handcuffs. Nobody should exploit a homeless addict for a political signature. And nobody should be afraid to demand that the system be secured simply because some political hack will call them an “election denier.”
Democracy cannot survive without confidence. Confidence cannot survive without transparency. If these allegations are proven, prosecute everyone involved regardless of party or ideology and follow the money wherever it leads. Stop pretending that fraud cannot happen. The federal government itself is now prosecuting people precisely because it can.
