Skid Row Homeless Residents Paid To Sign Ballot Petitions With Stolen Identities: DOJ

LOS ANGELES, CA — A Victorville man was arrested Thursday on federal charges claiming he and two petition circulators paid people on Skid Row to sign California ballot initiative petitions using the stolen identities of registered voters.

James Brass, 47, also known as "Lord," was arrested Thursday morning and was expected to make his initial appearance Thursday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Riverside, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

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Also charged in the two-count federal indictment are Courtney Price, 49, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Jateisha Herron, 33, of Boron in Kern County. Prosecutors said Price and Herron worked as petition circulators for Brass.

All three are charged with conspiracy to commit identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony. Brass and Price also face a separate count of identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony.

Prosecutors claim that from February through August, the defendants used a database to identify registered California voters. Brass and Price then went to Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, where they allegedly gave people the voters' identities and paid them to copy the personal information onto ballot initiative petitions and forge the voters' signatures.

After the petitions were signed, Brass and Herron are accused of signing declarations stating under penalty of perjury that they had personally witnessed the registered voters sign the petitions, according to the indictment.

The petitions were then submitted to petition coordinators as part of efforts to qualify an initiative for the ballot, prosecutors said.

Federal authorities did not identify the ballot initiative involved in the scheme.

Prosecutors said Brass knew the fraudulent signatures would result in payments from a petition management company. He received about $41,600 from coordinators working with one such company, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

California ballot initiatives require hundreds of thousands of voter signatures to qualify for an election. For 2026, proponents needed 546,651 valid signatures for a proposed statute and 874,641 for a proposed constitutional amendment, according to prosecutors.

If convicted, each defendant faces a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison for each count, prosecutors said.

The indictment comes after a Marina del Rey woman admitted in June to paying homeless people on Skid Row between $2 and $3 to register to vote.