The Justice Department announced on Monday that it charged a California woman with violating the law by paying people to register to vote.Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, was charged with one felony count of paying homeless people living in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles, and other individuals, to register. Armstrong, also known as Anika, faces up to five years in prison and has agreed to plead guilty, according to prosecutors. “False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections — even more so when payoffs are involved,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “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.”
According to her plea agreement, Armstrong periodically worked in a “petition circulation” role for roughly two decades and was paid by individuals and entities to collect voter signatures on official petitions for California state ballots, the DOJ said. Her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, leading Armstrong to “regularly” pay homeless people in Los Angeles to register to vote so they could add their signatures to petitions relating to initiatives, referendums, and recalls.
