There is an old saying that money can’t buy happiness, but as one California woman just discovered, two or three dollars can apparently buy a direct ticket to a federal courtroom.
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, a 64-year-old Marina del Rey resident who also went by the alias “Anika,” was federally charged on Monday for running a rather literal cash-for-votes scheme in downtown Los Angeles. For two decades, Armstrong made her living as a petition circulator, a job where political coordinators paid her a bounty for every registered voter’s signature she could round up to help get initiatives, recalls, and referendums onto the state ballot.
Looking for efficiency, Armstrong frequently took her business to the high-density streets of L.A.’s Skid Row, where a steady stream of folks were willing to sign her forms for a fast couple of bucks. There was just one snag in the business model: her coordinators only paid out for the signatures of registered voters, and a large portion of the Skid Row population wasn’t on the voter rolls.
To solve this bottleneck, federal prosecutors say Armstrong expanded her services starting around 2025. She grabbed stacks of official registration forms from the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters and began paying people to not just sign her petitions, but to register to vote on the spot.
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Because many individuals she approached lacked a permanent address, Armstrong solved the paperwork hurdle by having them list her former Los Angeles residence. Given that California automatically mails ballots to all registered voters, her helpful staging method meant federal election ballots could have been sent straight to an address where the voters didn’t actually live.
The logic worked fine until the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California stepped in. Investigators flagged a specific instance on January 30 where Armstrong knowingly handed over cash to get someone registered for federal elections.
“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.”
Armstrong has already signed a plea agreement and is scheduled to make her initial court appearance in Santa Ana, where she is expected to officially plead guilty to one felony count of paying another person to register to vote. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michael Wheat and Nandor Kiss are handling the prosecution.
While $3 usually buys a cheap cup of coffee, the statutory maximum penalty for this particular transaction is up to five years in a federal prison.
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