by Kevin Killough
Bill Essayli, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said Friday that his office has “multiple fraud investigations underway” in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He said he’s also working with Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, to conduct a comprehensive audit of California’s voter rolls.
Essayli didn’t comment on any specific investigation, but he said he’d “follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent.”
“The state has stonewalled every effort to verify that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered to vote,” Essayli said in a post on X.
Essayli referred to a case in which Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, took a plea deal for one felony count of paying another person to register to vote in a federal election. Prosecutors say she paid homeless people on Skid Row to register to vote, letting them use her address to register, in some cases. This allowed mail-in ballots to be sent to her home, according to a plea agreement, the California Post reported.
The scheme allegedly went on for 20 years. Essayli told the Post that a lot of fraud could have been prevented if the state shared the voter rolls with this office, and a lawsuit over the state’s refusal to share the rolls is before the Ninth Circuit.
California is not alone in this pattern. Several other states with expansive, all-mail or universal mail-in ballot programs — including Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Hawaii, and Vermont — have similarly resisted federal requests for complete, unredacted voter registration lists. These states, which automatically send ballots to every registered voter, have largely provided only redacted or limited versions of their rolls, often citing privacy concerns, even as the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against dozens of them to compel greater transparency.
– – –
Kevin Killough is a reporter at Just the News. Executive Editor of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network Christina Botteri contributed to this report.
