Left’s Election Fraud Denials Crumble as DOJ Exposes Two-Decade-Long California Cheating Scheme

Despite evidence to the contrary, liberal voting activists have spent years minimizing cheating concerns and portraying those who want to investigate such problems as “election deniers.” But the Justice Department, FBI, and Homeland Security are now systematically exposing electoral fraud from noncitizen voting to ballot-box-stuffing schemes that are turning the tables in epic fashion.

The latest strike came Monday when a longtime voting activist in California reached a deal with federal prosecutors to admit to illegally paying homeless people to sign election petitions and paying people to register to vote in a two-decade scheme that allegedly leveraged the Democrat-run state’s lax mail-in voting system, which sends ballot forms to everyone whether they ask for them or not.

The felony charge and plea deal announced Monday against Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina Del Ray, Calif., not only signals an investigation into others, it likely will provide legal fodder to the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to force California to turn over the voter registration database to look for other abuses.

That case, and others like it against blue states, are working their way through the federal courts in a major initiative led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

Prosecutors said Armstrong spent two decades collecting ballot registration forms, including in California’s high-profile voter initiatives. On occasion, Brown targeted homeless people on Skid Row in Los Angeles, offering them money to fill out forms, and even sometimes letting them use her own address to put on the forms.

The plea deal mentioned Armstrong was paid by “coordinators” to gather signatures for ballots, and she used some of that money to enlist people to register to vote and sign petitions.

“Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered voters,” the DOJ said in announcing the plea deal

“Armstrong regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3, to induce them to sign her petitions,” DOJ said, adding in January she “knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote. She paid the person for the purpose of causing that person to register to vote in federal elections.”

Federal prosecutors have not yet disclosed how many registrations or petition signatures were involved in the case.

Nonetheless, that scheme puts another powerful admission on record that America’s election system can be and is being abused.

“Today’s an example where fraud did occur. Not only did Ms. Brown pay people to register to vote, which is illegal, it is a federal crime. She also induced them to place false information on the voter registration,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said.

Over the last 18 months, the Trump DOJ has brought numerous cases of election fraud all across the country, with a heavy focus on noncitizens getting registered and voting illegally in federal elections. Federal law prohibits foreigners from voting in federal elections.

Just three weeks ago, four green-card resident aliens in New Jersey were charged with illegally voting in federal elections and making false statements while applying for United States citizenship. The case was cracked by a joint operation of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, and officials said it was the first of many more to come.

“Securing our elections from criminal actors here at home and around the world is one of the top priorities for this FBI,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “Noncitizens voting is a federal crime – period – and while other administrations may have looked the other way in the past, those days are over.

Similarly, DOJ secured an indictment in March against an illegal alien from Africa, alleging he had illegally voted in a stunning seven federal elections in Pennsylvania. 

Mahady Sacko, who came to the United States illegally from Mauritania, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the FBI in Philadelphia. He has been charged with voter fraud, officials said.

Last summer, the FBI filed a criminal complaint against a Chinese national attending the University of Michigan who illegally registered to vote in the days before the 2024 presidential election, apparently using his University of Michigan student ID, and then casting a ballot at a polling location located on campus.

That case was followed by bombshell admissions over the last few months, reported by Just the News, that China infiltrated as many as 18 states’ voter registration databases during the 2020 election and sent fake driver’s licenses to the United States in the summer of 2020 in what the FBI believed was a scheme to create illegal ballots to help Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump.

That evidence was suppressed for more than five years from Congress and the American public, officials have admitted.

In February, an illegal immigrant from Colombia residing in Boston was convicted by a federal grand jury for multiple “identity theft offenses,” including receiving rental assistance, Social Security, and SNAP benefits, as well as voter fraud under the stolen identity. Prosecutors alleged Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez, 59,  was able to obtain eight state IDs and a Massachusetts Real ID and vote illegally in the 2024 presidential election.

The steady stream of such cases is eroding public trust in election officials who have insisted everything is fine in the face of contrarian evidence.

A poll this spring found only two-thirds of Americans say they are confident their state or local government will run a fair and accurate election, a drop of 10 points since the 2024 presidential election and the lowest level of confidence since Marist began measuring it. Democrats and independents were the most likely to lose confidence in elections over the last two years, the poll found.

The ramped-up prosecutions also come as Dhillon, the top election integrity official inside DOJ, has taken action against more than two dozen states to either clean up their voter rolls or turn over their rolls for the federal government to inspect them. Many states are resisting.

Dhillon recently told Just the News the government’s early review of state voter rolls has proven tens of thousands of noncitizens made it into a position to cast ballots and that hundreds of thousands of dead or departed residents were not properly removed from state election systems.

“It’s really frustrating that we’re being prevented from doing our job,” she said, criticizing state election offices and federal judges who are blocking her office from her historic effort to obtain and review every state’s voter roll ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Dhillon signaled that dozens more cases of illegal noncitizen voting are on the horizon.

“For every person that we’ve seen a story about, I know of dozens and dozens more cases, and U.S. attorney’s offices are wanting to bring these cases, but we have, of course, interference with the very appointment of these U.S. attorneys at the political level,” she explained. “So that’s above my pay grade, but it’s really frustrating that we’re being prevented from doing our job.”

Evidence of election fraud is also piling up in state and local courts.

At least four elections in the U.S. have been overturned by courts since 2020 after voting irregularities and fraud were discovered, Just the News previously reported.

Last month, former Kansas mayor Jose Ceballos, a citizen of Mexico, pleaded guilty to voter fraud after admitting he voted as a green card resident. Ceballos, who resigned as mayor after he was charged, was taken into custody by US immigration authorities last week and could be deported, officials and his lawyer have said.

Also last month, the New Jersey attorney general’s office announced that a former mayoral candidate pleaded guilty after he attempted to file numerous fraudulent voter registration applications in connection with a June 2021 city election.

Henrilynn Ibezim, 71, of Plainfield, New Jersey, pleaded guilty on April 27, 2026, during a hearing before Judge Candido Rodriguez, Jr. in New Jersey Superior Court in Union County. The defendant admitted to count five of the indictment against him, charging him with one count of third-degree forgery.

Three women in Monroe County, Alabama – 67-year-old Sharon Crayton Denson, 46-year-old Samantha Trashawn Kyles, and 59-year-old Sarah Crayton Bennett – were indicted in February for voter fraud in the Aug. 26, 2025, Frisco City municipal election. They allegedly tampered with 20 people’s ballots.

Five Democratic Party members in Bridgeport, Conn., and Philadelphia were criminally charged with numerous counts of voter fraud on both the state and federal levels regarding mail-in ballots over the last few years, and in one case, the cheating was so extensive that an election had to be negated and done over. 

Bridgeport, Conn, had to redo primary and general elections last year after evidence surfaced of alleged ballot harvesting in the Democratic mayoral primary in September 2023. 

A jury in March also convicted a Wisconsin man of election fraud and identity theft after he requested the ballots of state Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Democratic Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

Harry Wait, 71, admitted Tuesday in court that in 2022, he ordered the ballots in an attempt to highlight alleged vulnerabilities in the state’s election system. That case followed another high-profile election fraud case in which a former Milwaukee election official was found guilty of misconduct in office in 2024 after she obtained three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers in 2022 and was sentenced to one year’s probation and ordered to pay a $3,000 fine.

While most of the cases in the past few years have involved Democrat or liberal figures, sometimes Republicans have been ensnared too,

Elizabeth Ann Davis, 61, of Castle Rock, Colo, was convicted last fall in state court of two counts of forgery and one count of impersonating an elector for submitting mail ballots for her late ex-husband and her son, in addition to her own ballot, in the 2022 general election. Davis is a Republican, according to the Associated Press. The DA’s office noted that Davis “has an extensive criminal record, including prior convictions for forgery, theft, drug offenses, and prostitution in both Florida and/or Colorado.”

“Those who seek to corrupt our elections or dilute our votes – by even a single ballot – will find a DA’s office intent on their incarceration,” District Attorney George Brauchler said at the time.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News,  Solomon played key reporting and executive roles at some of America’s most important journalism institutions, such as The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill.

Reprinted with permission from Just the News by John Solomon.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.