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…