Victorville Man Charged With Using Stolen Voter IDs to Fake California Ballot Petition Signatures

James Brass, 47, of Victorville, was arrested Thursday, September 10, and pleaded not guilty to federal charges accusing him of running a scheme that paid Skid Row homeless residents to forge ballot petition signatures using the stolen identities of registered California voters.

Brass, who allegedly went by the alias "Lord," was taken into custody without incident after FBI agents tailed him from his Victorville home to a nearby gas station, according to Hoodline. He appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Angela Viramontes in Riverside federal court Thursday afternoon and was released on a $10,000 bond. His trial is tentatively scheduled for November 2.

A federal indictment returned Wednesday also names two petition circulators prosecutors say worked for Brass: Courtney Price, 49, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Jateisha Herron, 33, of Boron in Kern County. Neither has been arrested. All three face one count of conspiracy to commit identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony; Brass and Price face an additional identity fraud count. Each count carries a statutory maximum of five years in prison.

What prosecutors allege

According to the indictment, Brass ran his operation through a company called Pinnacle Brass LLC, registered as a signature-gathering business with the California Secretary of State. From February through August, prosecutors say the three defendants used a database to pull up registered California voters' names and personal information, then handed that stolen data to people on Skid Row and paid them to copy it onto ballot initiative petitions and forge the voters' signatures.

Afterward, prosecutors allege, Brass and Herron signed declarations at the bottom of the petitions swearing under penalty of perjury that they had personally witnessed the named voters sign, and that each signature was genuine. Those petitions were then submitted to petition coordinators as part of an effort to qualify an initiative for the ballot, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Federal authorities have not identified which initiative was involved.

Brass allegedly knew the fraudulent signatures would trigger payment from a petition management company and received roughly $41,600 from coordinators, prosecutors said. For 2026, California required 546,651 valid signatures to qualify a proposed statute and 874,641 for a constitutional amendment, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

The federal reaction

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who labeled the case "California Election Fraud" on X, said the defendants "used stolen identities of registered voters to manufacture signatures on ballot petitions used to shape California law" and "allegedly used people, including members of Skid Row's vulnerable homeless population, to try to cover up their tracks."

FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital that "securing American elections from criminal interference is of the upmost importance to this FBI," while Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said the scheme "sought to undermine an essential pillar of our democracy."

Not the first Skid Row case

This is the second federal case in recent months tied to petition and registration fraud on Skid Row. In May, federal prosecutors charged 64-year-old signature collector Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, who agreed to plead guilty to paying homeless residents $2 to $3, cigarettes, or phone cords to register voters, sometimes using her former home address, according to the LA Times. She was sentenced in August to 18 months' probation and 120 hours of community service. That case reportedly originated from undercover footage recorded by James O'Keefe and Project Veritas.

Essayli said in June that federal prosecutors and the FBI had opened multiple election fraud investigations across California, citing voter-roll audits.

Where the coverage diverges

Fox News framed the Brass arrest as part of a broader "Trump election fraud crackdown," tying it in the same report to unrelated items like an FBI raid on a "Soros-backed voter group's" headquarters. Nothing in the indictment or the U.S. Attorney's statements connects Brass's alleged scheme to any of those other cases or to a coordinated political target list. The Los Angeles Times and local outlets including KESQ and MyNewsLA stuck to the specific charges and facts without that broader framing.

Critics of aggressive federal election-fraud enforcement sometimes argue such pushes are selectively aimed at Democratic-leaning states or advocacy groups for political effect. Nothing in these sources establishes that concern here. The charges rest on a grand jury indictment alleging specific, identity-theft-based conduct, and the underlying scheme, stolen voter data used to forge signatures, would be illegal under California election law regardless of who benefits from the initiative in question.

What's still unknown

Federal authorities have not said which ballot initiative the alleged fraudulent signatures were meant to support, whether the petition ultimately qualified for any ballot, or how many total signatures in the effort were fraudulent. Price and Herron have been indicted but have not been arrested, remain at large, and have not been reached for comment. Brass has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent unless proven guilty at his November 2 trial.