California Woman Federally Charged with Paying Individuals, Including Homeless People on L.A.’s Skid Row, to Register to Vote

A California woman who worked as a longtime signature collector for ballot initiatives has been charged with paying individuals - including homeless people living in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles - to register to vote.

"False registrations undermine Americans' faith in elections - even more so when payoffs are involved," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. "This Justice Department is committed to ensuring that all U.S. elections are fair and free from illegal meddling - so that all Americans can accept the results with confidence."

Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, of Marina del Rey, California, 64, also known as "Anika," is charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal charge that carries a statutory maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.

Armstrong has agreed to plead guilty to the charge and is scheduled to make her initial appearance this morning in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana. She is expected to plead guilty in the coming weeks.

According to her plea agreement, for approximately 20 years, Armstrong periodically worked as a "petition circulator." In that role, she was paid by individuals and entities - known as "coordinators" - to collect voter signatures on official petitions that qualify initiatives, referendums, and recalls for California state ballots. Armstrong drove around the Los Angeles area to find registered voters to sign the petitions.

After gathering enough signatures, Armstrong returned the petitions to her coordinators, who then paid her a set amount for each registered voter's signature. The amount she was paid varied depending on the specific ballot initiative. Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered voters.

Armstrong occasionally solicited petitioned signatures in Skid Row, an area of downtown Los Angeles notorious for its homelessness problem. Skid Row was a convenient place for Armstrong to collect signatures because of its high concentration of people in a relatively small area who were willing to sign petitions in exchange for payment. Armstrong regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3, to induce them to sign her petitions.

Many of Skid Row's homeless population were not registered to vote. To ensure she maximized her pay from her coordinators, starting no later than 2025, Armstrong began offering payment to individuals not only to sign her petitions, but also to complete a voter registration form. Before going to Skid Row, Armstrong gathered a stack of voter registration forms from the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters.

Some homeless people did not have an address to put on the forms. On several occasions, Armstrong provided a homeless individual with her own former address in Los Angeles so they had something to write on the registration form. These registration forms simultaneously registered an individual to vote in California elections and in federal elections.

Because California automatically sends a vote-by-mail ballot to every registered voter, this also meant ballots in some homeless individuals' names could have the potential to be sent to Armstrong's former residence where the homeless individual did not live or collect mail.

On Jan. 30, as part of her ongoing scheme, Armstrong knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote. She paid the person for the purpose of causing that person to register to vote in federal elections.

The FBI and investigators with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California investigated this matter.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michael Wheat and Nandor Kiss for the Central District of California are prosecuting this case.