On the sidewalk of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a woman walks from person to person, sidestepping needles, empty bottles and human excrement. She approaches each individual carefully, offering them a few dollars or a cigarette. In exchange, she asks them to give her information for a voter registration form, adding them to the California voter roll. If they don’t have a residential address, she claims it’s fine to use hers.
Tomorrow, they won’t remember the interaction — as they continue to suffer in addiction, their names are being used to advance a political agenda.
The woman’s name is Brenda Lee Armstrong, and she just pleaded guilty to a federal felony.
It’s easy to dismiss her case; she’s just one person in a city of millions. This instinct to minimize, to write off as an anomaly, misses the entire point: It’s the laws in California that create structural vulnerabilities allowing for this behavior in the first place. When states take such a lackadaisical approach to election administration, they fling open the gates to fraud, holding their noses and looking away.
In California, anyone can register to vote online, to any address, without verification of legal eligibility to vote (no Social Security number or government-issued ID required). Anyone registered to vote (dead or alive, moved from the state) receives a mail ballot to the address on record, whether or not they requested it. Anyone can collect anyone else’s live ballot. And — perhaps the most egregious — ballots can arrive weeks after the election is over, after results have already been tallied, shifting a known result.
Armstrong was a paid circulator, paid for signatures from registered voters. She had a direct financial incentive to manufacture registrations, and California’s laws gave her the tools to do it. No one blinked an eye when her address was used for many more people than actually lived there. California’s mail-ballot system dutifully sent ballots there. The eventual investigation was triggered not by internal election office mechanisms, but by video footage of an interaction on the street. A random bystander held her accountable, not the election officials whose literal job it is to do so.
The same election officials who failed in the Armstrong case have now presided over the most recent Los Angeles mayoral election. On June 3, the night of the primary, Spencer Pratt landed in second place, leading Nithya Raman by 10 percent of the votes (40,000 votes). Then the mail-in ballots started to arrive — the same ballots mailed to a bloated voter roll and harvested by anyone for anyone.
Overnight, a batch of ballots delivered nearly 43,000 votes to Raman, pushing her ahead of Pratt. Incidentally, this is the number of homeless individuals in Los Angeles. The other Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, did not receive a proportionally larger share of the vote — only Raman did. This is highly, highly statistically unlikely. Brenda Lee Armstrong got caught. How many more have not?
So what is the fix? How can Californians escape this vicious cycle of poor election administration that disenfranchises and exploits voters? Among the options for good policy changes, four primary solutions matter most.
The first solution is to implement the state into alignment with the majority of other states and with the will of 83 percent of the American people. Voters must prove that they are who they claim to be. Across all demographics and political parties, this policy remains overwhelmingly popular.
In California, residents don’t bat an eye when they provide their ID to attend concerts, go to the doctor, rent an apartment, or buy a beer. Yet to suggest the same for casting a ballot is anathema to the California political leadership. The people of California must demand this policy to better secure elections.
The second solution is making sure voter rolls are accurate. This is already required by federal law, and California — as is apparent from the Armstrong case — readily allows ineligible registrations.
While the people on Skid Row are eligible to vote, they cannot be registered at another person’s address, and there is no mechanism to verify whether that is accurate. In fact, California is resisting a Justice investigation into the accuracy of its voter rolls. Until California takes this federal requirement seriously, schemers and fraudsters will manipulate the most vulnerable to advance a political agenda.
The third solution is prohibiting ballot harvesting. Chain of custody for ballots is critical to ensuring that the voters’ will is accurately reflected in the electoral outcome. Prohibiting ballot harvesting deters targeted manipulation of vulnerable voters — the homeless, mentally incapacitated or nursing home residents.
The fourth solution is requiring all ballots to be received by Election Day. California is one of the most serious offenders, allowing ballots to be received weeks after the election, contributing to public skepticism, opening the door to fraud, and prolonging certification of election results.
Voting is the foundational act of self-governance in our constitutional republic. It’s the mechanism by which citizens exercise equal power over the direction of their communities. To reduce that act to a transaction worth less than a cup of coffee is both a violation of the law and the right to vote. This is not meaningful participation in democracy. It’s purposeful exploitation of people struggling with homelessness, addiction, poverty and brokenness.
Elections are worth protecting because voters are worth more than $2 and a cigarette.