Woman Paid Cash To Skid Row Homeless Who Registered To Vote: DOJ

LOS ANGELES — A Marina del Rey woman has been charged with paying people — including the unhoused residents of Los Angeles Skid Row — to register to vote, according to authorities.

Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64 — also known as “Anika” — is charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal charge that could result in up to five years in prison, authorities said.

Armstrong agreed to plead guilty and is expected to make her plea in the coming weeks, authorities said Monday.

For about 20 years, she periodically worked as a petition circulator and was paid to collect voter signatures on petitions to qualify initiatives, referendums and recalls for California state ballots, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“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,” the department said in a news release “Armstrong regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3, to induce them to sign her petitions.”

Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered, authorities said.

Starting no later than 2025, Armstrong began offering payment to people not only to sign the petitions, but also to complete a voter registration form, according to authorities. On Jan. 30, Armstrong paid a person to register to vote, authorities said.

Some homeless people did not have an address to put on the forms, according to authorities, and on several occasions, Armstrong provided a homeless person with her own former address in Los Angeles. Because California automatically sends a vote-by-mail ballot to every registered voter, this meant ballots in some people’s names had the potential to be sent to Armstrong’s former residence, where the people did not live or collect mail, authorities said.