A federal guilty plea confirmed what hidden cameras caught in Los Angeles: paid petition circulators directing homeless individuals to forge real voters’ signatures on ballot petitions. Now federal investigators are probing whether the same apparatus shaped who advanced in the city’s mayoral race. Maryland has none of the safeguards that might have stopped any of it.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
On March 17, investigators with the O’Keefe Media Group released undercover footage from Los Angeles’s Skid Row showing petition circulators handing homeless individuals printed lists of real registered voters, instructing them to copy those names and forge their signatures on official ballot petitions — and offering cash and drugs as payment. A woman identified in that footage subsequently pleaded guilty to federal charges.
The scheme was not a spontaneous act of individual misconduct. It was an organized operation, with coordinators paying circulators per signature and monitoring their work in real time. The petitions in question would have placed ballot measures before California voters.
As of this week, the scope of the alleged fraud has grown significantly. A New York Post review of Los Angeles voting records, published June 9, found approximately 7,600 registered voters tied to homeless shelters, supportive housing sites, and service providers across the city — including 1,160 registrations linked to a single Skid Row shelter that lists beds for fewer than 130 residents. Federal investigators are now examining whether that voter registration apparatus influenced the outcome of the city’s June 2 mayoral primary, in which progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman overtook election-night frontrunner Spencer Pratt in the late count to advance to a November runoff against incumbent Karen Bass. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli confirmed his office has “multiple” active fraud probes connected to the city races.
The question for Maryland is not whether this specific operation crossed state lines. It’s whether the structural conditions that allowed it to operate undetected in California also exist here. They do — and in some respects, Maryland is more exposed.
How the Fraud Works
Petition fraud of this type exploits a gap between what circulators are legally required to do and what anyone actually checks. In California, circulators were required to personally witness each signature they submitted. The scheme worked because that affidavit requirement was the only backstop — there was no disclosure requirement identifying whether circulators were paid, no prohibition on per-signature compensation creating a financial incentive to cut corners, and verification relied on spot-checking rather than full review.
The result was a scheme that could operate at scale for what federal prosecutors indicated was years. The fraud only came to light because journalists went undercover. The state’s own verification apparatus missed it.
Maryland’s Documented Gap
A Ballotpedia analysis of all 26 states with citizen initiative or referendum processes identified five common safeguard categories for petition circulators: badge or disclosure requirements identifying paid circulators; prohibitions on per-signature pay; requirements that circulators read or display information about the measure; additional signer identification requirements; and disclosure of paid vs. volunteer status on the petition itself.
Maryland is in a five-state cohort — alongside Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, and Washington — that has none of the five safeguard categories. In a state with an active referendum process, that is not a technicality. It means a paid, coordinated petition operation in Maryland faces no disclosure requirements, no per-signature pay prohibition, no voter affiliation requirement for circulators, and no additional checks on who is signing or whether they are who they claim to be.
The only requirement Maryland law imposes on circulators is an affidavit, signed at the bottom of each petition page, affirming that the circulator personally witnessed each signature. It is precisely the same backstop California relied on — and precisely the backstop the LA scheme demonstrated can be defeated.
The Verification Math
When petitions are submitted in Maryland, the State Board of Elections does not verify every signature. For large petitions, the law permits random sample verification: a sample of 500 signatures or 5 percent of the total — whichever is greater — is reviewed to determine what share is valid.
If that sample shows that valid signatures exceed 105 percent of the required threshold, the petition is certified without further review. If the sample shows validity below 95 percent, the petition fails. In the middle range — between 95 and 105 percent of the requirement — a full verification is conducted.
The practical consequence: a coordinated fraud operation that seeds forged signatures throughout a petition, but maintains a high enough overall rate of valid signatures in the sampled pages, could clear verification without triggering a full audit. The LA scheme did not require sophisticated execution — it required only that the forgery rate remain below what any spot check would catch at scale.
“We have one that taxes billionaires 5%. One-time tax. 5% and that’s gonna go towards healthcare.”
— LA petition circulator recorded by O’Keefe Media Group investigators, describing a measure being circulated as circulators directed homeless individuals to forge signatures
The California petitions targeted in the investigation were tied to ballot measures with significant political and financial stakes — including a proposed billionaire tax and a measure affecting hotel and airline workers ahead of the 2026 World Cup. The incentive structure for professional petition fraud scales with the political and financial interest in getting a measure qualified. Maryland’s petition process, which can place legislation before voters or block enacted laws, carries comparable stakes.
When Voter Registration Becomes the Weapon
The LA scheme required one additional ingredient beyond the paid circulators themselves: printed lists of real registered voters whose names and addresses could be assigned to homeless signers. The circulators did not fabricate identities wholesale — they used actual voter records to produce signatures that would match what was on file.
The New York Post’s June 9 review of Los Angeles voting records reveals how that resource was cultivated. Roughly 7,600 registered voters were tied to homeless shelters, supportive housing developments, and service providers across the city. The Midnight Mission on Skid Row showed 1,160 registrations connected to its address — a facility that lists beds for 84 men and 36 women. A Venice drop-in center with no overnight beds showed 185 registered voters at its address.
That same center — St. Joseph Center — received $600,000 in taxpayer funding from the Los Angeles city homeless and housing committee while Nithya Raman served as chair. A photograph of Raman presenting the check to the organization was reportedly removed from the organization’s website following press inquiries. Essayli said his office is reviewing the allegations and “will follow the evidence.”
The mechanism connects: if voter registrations at shelter addresses can be generated at scale — whether through paid drives, coerced compliance, or outright fabrication — those registrations become a usable pool of real voter identities. A name and address that exists in the official rolls, attached to a person unlikely to track their own voting record, is the raw material for both petition fraud and ballot fraud.
The value of that resource depends on the accuracy and accessibility of voter rolls. Maryland’s rolls have already been flagged by multiple parties as potentially unreliable. The Department of Justice sent Maryland a letter in mid-2025 requesting voter registration data from 2022 through 2024, including counts of voters identified as ineligible — part of a broader federal inquiry into noncitizen and ineligible voting. Republican legal groups filed a separate action citing data allegedly showing counties with implausibly high registration rates.
The State Board of Elections also enacted a 2023 regulation restricting outside groups from accessing voter data for fraud investigation purposes. A federal judge struck down that regulation in March 2025, ruling it was preempted by the National Voter Registration Act. The SBE’s attempt to limit that access — and its reversal in court — did not resolve the underlying question of roll accuracy.
Inflated or inaccurate voter rolls do not by themselves constitute fraud. But they increase the pool of real voter names available to exploit — names that appear valid in the system, attached to addresses that pass basic verification, and belonging to individuals who may never know their identities were used.
What Maryland Has Not Done
The California fraud operation ran, by some accounts, for close to two decades before undercover journalism forced law enforcement to act. No state agency detected it through routine verification. The U.S. Attorney moved only after the footage was public. Federal investigators are now examining whether that same infrastructure extended to actual vote totals in a major municipal election — a progression from petition fraud to ballot fraud that, if proven, would represent a categorically different scale of harm.
There is no public record that the Maryland State Board of Elections has conducted any assessment of petition-fraud risk in light of the California findings. There is no public record of any petition pages in Maryland having been flagged for circulator-related fraud in recent election cycles. The State Prosecutor’s office, which has jurisdiction over election law violations, has not publicly disclosed any petition-fraud investigations.
That absence of recorded incidents is not the same as an absence of vulnerability. It may reflect that no one has looked.
The Structural Question
The point of the California investigation was not that election fraud is widespread. It was that a specific mechanism — paid circulators with financial incentives per signature, operating without disclosure requirements or meaningful verification, combined with voter registration drives targeting populations unlikely to track their own ballots — created conditions under which fraud could occur systematically and remain invisible until someone looked.
Maryland has the same mechanism. It has fewer safeguards than California did. It has a homeless population concentrated in cities with active political organizing infrastructure, voter rolls that have already drawn federal scrutiny, and a State Board of Elections that went to court to limit outside access to its records.
The California case produced a guilty plea. Federal investigators are now examining whether it produced a tainted election result. Both of those developments produce the same question for every state with an unregulated petition process: has anyone checked?
In Maryland, the answer is not yet clear. That is itself an answer of a kind.
Sources: O’Keefe Media Group, “Cash for Ballots” Parts I–II (March–June 2026). U.S. Department of Justice, guilty plea / federal charges, Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, Skid Row petition fraud, May 2026. New York Post, “LA Skid Row homeless claim they’ve been paid to vote for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” June 9, 2026. LA Mag, “Nithya Raman Ousts Spencer Pratt in LA Mayor Runoff Race,” June 9, 2026. MyNewsLA, “Bass, Raman Launch Campaigns for LA Mayor As They Head to November Runoff,” June 9, 2026. Ballotpedia, “Twenty-one states set at least one requirement on ballot initiative petition circulators,” May 21, 2026. Maryland State Board of Elections, Petition Signature Gathering FAQ. Maryland State Board of Elections, Petition Acceptance and Verification Procedures. Maryland Election Law § 6-207, Verification of Signatures (2022). Maryland Elections, Procedures for Filing a Statewide or Public Local Law Referendum Petition. Maryland Matters, “Justice Department, conservative law firm set sights on Maryland voter registrations,” July 23, 2025. The Daily Record, “MD voter records must be available to groups investigating perceived fraud, judge rules,” March 6, 2025. California Globe, “O’Keefe Media Group Undercover Investigation Exposes Cash-for-Ballots Election Fraud Scheme,” March 2026.
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