Roughly twenty FBI and Homeland Security Investigations agents fanned out across Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, questioning homeless residents about allegations they were bribed, some for as little as two dollars, to register and vote in the June 2 primary election. The agents, dressed in plainclothes jeans, sweatshirts, and baseball caps, conducted as many as fifty interviews in the sprawling encampment district, the New York Post reported.
The Department of Justice confirmed the agents were investigating a "criminal matter" but offered no further detail. The FBI said it does not comment on ongoing investigations.
What prompted the operation: video clips that surfaced the week after Election Day showing Skid Row residents claiming they had been paid small sums of cash to vote for specific candidates, including incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Nithya Raman. Those clips were provided to the DOJ. Now the federal government is on the ground, trying to determine who organized the alleged scheme and how far it reached.
One named witness, a Skid Row resident called Kevin Shepherd, told reporters he was initially offered two dollars but negotiated for a higher payment. Shepherd said he completed a mail-in ballot for Bass and deposited it in a ballot box.
When asked whether he would also have been paid to vote for Raman, Shepherd said yes. He said Spencer Pratt, a candidate who initially led Raman in the vote count before being overtaken, was not among the candidates he was encouraged to support.
"They gave you an optional choice."
That was Shepherd's description of the arrangement. Another unnamed man on Skid Row claimed he received four dollars to vote for Bass. Neither the organizers of the alleged payment scheme nor any intermediaries have been publicly identified.
The Post's own records review identified more than 7,600 registered voters linked to shelters and social service entities across Los Angeles. The Midnight Mission on Skid Row alone had 1,160 voter registrations connected to its address. A homeless services drop-in center in Venice had 185 registered voters tied to it, and that same center had received a $600,000 taxpayer-funded grant awarded by Raman while she chaired the City Council's Housing and Homelessness Committee.
California automatically mails ballots to every registered voter. That means a fraudulent registration at a shelter address could produce a live ballot delivered to someone other than the person whose name appears on it. The system, in other words, creates an obvious vulnerability, and the scale of registrations at these addresses suggests someone may have exploited it.
Election law attorney Garrett Fahy offered a blunt assessment of the broader registration patterns identified in the review:
"This is the system that our representatives have given to us. If you don't like our system, don't yell at your local elections official."
Fahy said the concentration of voters registered through shelters and service providers should be viewed within the framework of California election law, a framework, he noted, that the state's own legislators designed.
The Skid Row operation did not materialize out of thin air. Three days after the June 2 election, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced his office was pursuing several election fraud investigations in coordination with the FBI. On the same day, a federal prosecutor visited the LA County ballot processing facility amid questions about the speed of ballot counting, a concern shared by a majority of voters nationwide who say ballots should be counted within twenty-four hours of polls closing.
Essayli stated he was working with the Department of Justice "to conduct a comprehensive audit of California's voter rolls." That effort has run into resistance. Just The News reported that California has refused to share its voter rolls with federal authorities, and a lawsuit over that refusal is currently before the Ninth Circuit Court.
"The state has stonewalled every effort to verify that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered to vote."
That was Essayli's characterization of California's posture. He added: "I will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent."
A state that refuses to let federal investigators verify who is on its voter rolls while federal agents are interviewing homeless people about being paid to cast ballots, that is a picture worth pausing on. The Justice Department has been ramping up fraud-related enforcement on multiple fronts, and California's resistance to basic transparency only sharpens the question of what the rolls would reveal.
The investigation already has at least one concrete result. Fox News reported that a Marina del Rey resident named Anika Brenda Lee Armstrong, 64, was charged with one felony count of paying people to register to vote, a charge carrying up to five years in federal prison. Armstrong allegedly paid homeless individuals on Skid Row between two and three dollars per registration, sometimes listing her own former address on their forms. She took a plea deal. Prosecutors allege the scheme ran for twenty years.
Because California mails ballots to all registered voters, fraudulent registrations bearing Armstrong's address could have produced ballots sent directly to her, not to the homeless individuals whose names appeared on the forms. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon framed the prosecution in direct terms:
"False registrations undermine Americans' faith in elections, even more so when payoffs are involved. 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."
Twenty years. A two-dollar handshake on a sidewalk, repeated over and over, allegedly producing a stream of ballots routed to one woman's mailbox. And until now, no one stopped it.
The June 2 primary saw Bass win the mayoral contest handily. Raman came in second after what the Post described as a late surge in mail-in ballots, a surge that carried her past Pratt, who had initially led her in the count. No one has alleged that the mail-in surge was itself fraudulent, but the timeline and the Skid Row allegations have fed public suspicion about how those ballots were generated.
California's election infrastructure has faced scrutiny from multiple directions. In Riverside County, a sheriff seized 650,000 ballots in a separate election fraud probe, only to face demands from state officials to stop. That investigation was later paused after what the sheriff called "politically motivated lawsuits."
The pattern is consistent: local and federal investigators try to examine California's election machinery, and the state pushes back.
Against this backdrop, the Los Angeles City Council voted, just one day before the FBI descended on Skid Row, to move forward with a proposal to allow immigrant noncitizens to vote in city and school board elections. The measure was introduced by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
Soto-Martínez defended the proposal:
"It just does not make sense to me that someone who moves to Los Angeles for a temporary job has more of a voice than a parent who has been here for decades raising their children through public schools."
The timing could hardly be worse. Federal agents are actively investigating whether people were paid to cast ballots they may not have been entitled to cast, and the city council's response is to expand the pool of eligible voters to include noncitizens. Whatever the policy merits of the proposal, advancing it while a criminal voter fraud probe is underway sends a clear signal about the council's priorities.
FBI Director Kash Patel weighed in on the Skid Row investigation with a post on X:
"Securing our elections is of the upmost priority for this FBI! If you mess with our elections we will find you!"
No arrests have been announced in connection with the Skid Row interviews conducted Thursday. The identity of whoever organized the alleged payment scheme, beyond the already-charged Armstrong, remains publicly unknown. Neither Bass nor Raman has responded to the allegations, at least not in any statement captured in the reporting so far.
The broader pattern of California election fraud investigations being slowed or blocked raises an obvious question: How much fraud has gone undetected in a state that refuses to share its voter rolls and automatically mails ballots to every name on them?
The video clips from Skid Row have not been independently authenticated. The witness claims are just that, claims. But the FBI does not send twenty agents to interview fifty people on a sidewalk over nothing. And a twenty-year registration-for-cash scheme that only now produced a federal charge suggests the problem is not new. What's new is that someone is finally looking.
When the people most vulnerable to exploitation, homeless Americans living on concrete, are the ones being handed two-dollar bills to fill out ballots, the question isn't whether election integrity matters. It's why so many people in power spent so long pretending it didn't.