A Southern California woman has admitted to paying homeless people living in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles to register to vote, federal prosecutors announced May 18.

Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, from the upscale coastal enclave of Marina del Ray, will plead guilty to one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison.

Under the plea agreement, Armstrong admitted to working as a paid “petition circulator” for about 20 years to collect voter signatures on official petitions, referendums, and recalls for state ballots.

Around 2025, she began offering payment to homeless people on Skid Row to maximize her pay for signatures, according to prosecutors.

“False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections—even more so when payoffs are involved,” said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the 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 was scheduled to make her first appearance in U.S. district court in Santa Ana, Calif. on Monday. She is expected to plead guilty in the next few weeks, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

Beyond the prison term, Armstrong faces three-years’ probation, a fine of $10,000, and a mandatory special fee of $100, according to her plea deal.

Prosecutors say Armstrong was paid a set amount for each registered voter’s signature she collected for ballot initiatives during her work as a signature collector.

One location Armstrong would occasionally visit for petition signatures was the Skid Row neighborhood, an impoverished, rundown urban neighborhood known for its concentrated homeless population.

Prosecutors said she would go to Skid Row because there was a high concentration of people in a relatively small area, and they were willing to sign petitions in exchange for payment, according to court documents.

“Defendant would regularly pay and offer to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2.00 to $3.00, to induce them to sign her petitions,” the plea agreement stated. “She would also offer other incentives for signatures, including giving out cigarettes, and phone cards.”

Many of the homeless people she met were not registered to vote in California, and Armstrong’s coordinators wouldn’t pay for their signatures, according to the agreement.

Prosecutors said Armstrong would gather a stack of voter registration forms from the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters before heading out to Skid Row. She would then offer homeless people payment to register to vote and for their signatures, according to the court-filed plea agreement.

Some homeless people didn’t have an address to put on the forms. For some, Armstrong wrote in her own former address in Los Angeles so they could complete the registration, according to the plea agreement.

The registration forms would register the voter in state and federal elections, because California automatically sends a vote-by-mail ballot to every registered voter, meaning the ballots for homeless people could have been sent to Armstrong’s former home, according to federal prosecutors.

The payment scheme was carried out in 2025 and 2026, according to the DOJ.

Armstrong’s attorney, Branch Chief for the Federal Public Defender’s office Kelley Munoz, didn’t immediately return a request for comment.