Federal agents took James Brass into custody without incident early Thursday after tailing him from his Victorville home to a nearby gas station, capping an investigation into an alleged scheme that paid homeless Skid Row residents a few dollars each to sign California ballot petitions. The 47-year-old, who allegedly went by the alias “Lord,” left his home around 4:45 a.m. before agents caught up with him around 6 a.m., according to the case details.
Brass was arrested by the FBI in Victorville, San Bernardino County, as reported by the New York Post. He is accused of running an election fraud scheme that allegedly used the stolen identities of real voters, and he owned Pinnacle Brass, a signature-gathering business registered with the California Secretary of State. Prosecutors allege Brass paid at least $41,000 for collected signatures, though the exact number of fake signatures involved and which ballot measures were targeted remain unclear, per the same report.
Following his arrest, Brass faced conspiracy and identity fraud charges. The indictment also names 33-year-old Jateisha Herron of Boron and 49-year-old Courtney Price of Jacksonville, Florida, both described as petition circulators. All three were charged with one count of conspiracy to commit identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony; Brass and Price also faced an additional count of identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony, per the New York Post's reporting.
A Broader Federal Crackdown on Petition Fraud
The Brass indictment lands amid a wider federal push. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, described as Los Angeles's top federal prosecutor, said he was pursuing a series of election fraud cases, and he said the defendants preyed on vulnerable homeless people to try to cover their tracks, according to the New York Post's account. In June, Essayli announced that federal prosecutors and the FBI had launched multiple election fraud investigations across California, according to FOX 11 Los Angeles, with officials citing voter-roll audits and election-fraud investigations.
That push follows an earlier case involving the same population. In May, federal prosecutors charged 64-year-old signature collector Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, who agreed to plead guilty to paying Skid Row residents $2 to $3, cigarettes, or phone cords to register voters, sometimes using her former home address, according to the LA Times. Armstrong was sentenced in August to 18 months of probation and 120 hours of community service. Prosecutors said that case originated from undercover footage recorded by James O'Keefe and Project Veritas showing circulators paying unhoused residents in downtown Los Angeles, per the same outlet's reporting.
A Pattern Stretching Back Nearly a Decade
Skid Row's concentration of unhoused residents — the highest in Los Angeles County — has been the setting for multiple cases involving circulators and nominal payments, the LA Times reports, with prosecutors noting that circulators exploited residents' extreme economic necessity through nominal payments. That dynamic is not new. In November 2018, the Los Angeles County District Attorney charged nine petition circulators in a felony voter fraud scheme for offering $1 cash or cigarettes to Skid Row residents in exchange for fake signatures during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, according to CBS News. By July 2020, Christopher Williams had pleaded no contest and received probation, the station reported at the time.
The Legal Exposure Facing Circulators
The case involves allegations related to voter registration and initiative petitions. The earlier Skid Row case involved a federal charge carrying up to five years in prison.
Paid circulators are also subject to rules concerning signature collection. The sources do not establish additional legal exposure beyond fraud charges tied to the signatures.
