Spencer Pratt held second place on election night and lost it when the mail-in ballots arrived.
Those ballots came from somewhere – and this week someone went to Skid Row to find out.
One resident said four words on camera that nobody at Los Angeles City Hall can explain.
Paid to Vote for Karen Bass: What Skid Row Residents Said on Camera
Multiple Skid Row residents described the same operation in separate on-camera interviews obtained by The California Post: volunteers showed up, put cash in people's hands, and told them exactly who to mark on the ballot.
One woman said she was handed a ballot, told to fill it out for Mayor Karen Bass, and paid $2 for it.
"They come out here all the time," she said.
A second woman said four words on camera: "I was paid five."
She had been instructed to vote for Bass as well.
A man who identified himself as Kevin Shepherd said he received $4 to vote for Bass – after negotiating up from the initial $2 offer.
He completed a mail-in ballot for Bass and deposited it in a ballot collection box.
A third resident described the same pattern.
"It happened more than four or five times," said Mark Sanchez, who claimed political canvassers repeatedly approached him to sign petitions and cast votes in exchange for cash.
Copies of the videos were submitted to the Department of Justice.
Nithya Raman's 43000-Vote Surge and Where It Came From
Nithya Raman gave a concession speech on election night.
She had collected just 20% of early mail-in ballots and was running third.
Then the post-election ballots arrived – and Raman collected 37% of them, a 17-point surge that materialized from nowhere and erased Pratt's lead entirely.
According to an analysis published by The Washington Times, the most concentrated batches of those late-arriving mail ballots came from Skid Row precincts – home to tens of thousands of homeless residents with no address or phone number to verify them.
Raman's own district is Los Feliz and Silver Lake.
She had no organic base on Skid Row.
Don Garza, a disabled military veteran who has lived on Skid Row since 1999, knows exactly what happened.
"We are tired of it," Garza said. "We don't want people coming in and deciding elections and taking advantage of us. Every one of them thinks they have claim to our voice."
Skid Row Election Fraud Has Happened Before and People Went to Jail
The Heritage Foundation's election fraud database documents an identical operation on the same streets.
In 2020, prosecutors charged nine people connected to a scheme that offered Skid Row homeless residents money and cigarettes in exchange for fraudulent signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms – across both the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.
One defendant, Norman Hall, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in county jail.
Just last month, a California woman pleaded guilty to federal charges of paying homeless people on Skid Row to register to vote using her former home address – ensuring mail-in ballots were delivered directly to her.
This is not an anomaly. It is a method – practiced, refined, and repeated across multiple election cycles on the same block.
How Ballot Harvesting in California Made All of This Legal
Ballot harvesting is legal in California.
Every registered voter receives a mail-in ballot automatically.
Ballots postmarked by Election Day are counted up to seven days later.
There is no photo ID requirement.
In 2024, a Judicial Watch lawsuit forced Los Angeles County to remove 1.2 million inactive voter registrations from its rolls.
The Democratic Socialists of America's Los Angeles chapter published a public "How To: Ballot Delivery" guide instructing volunteers how to collect completed mail ballots and submit them immediately.
Democrats designed every feature of this system. The Skid Row videos are not a failure of that system. They are proof it works – paid volunteers showed up, collected ballots from people who couldn't name the candidates, and walked away.
U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli had already opened "multiple election fraud investigations" related to California's elections before the videos surfaced.
"We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent," Essayli said.
The videos are now in federal hands.
The homeless residents who spoke on camera called it what it was: fraudulent behavior.
Pratt called it something else – he noted that Los Angeles has approximately 43,000 homeless people, and Raman's post-election surge was approximately 43,000 votes.
Sources:
- The California Post, "Skid Row Homeless Claim They've Been Paid to Vote for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman," June 10, 2026.
- Angelina Delfin, "Homeless Claim They Were Paid to Vote in Los Angeles," The Daily Signal, June 11, 2026.
- Cheryl K. Chumley, "The Statistical Impossibility of L.A.'s Mayor Race," The Washington Times, June 8, 2026.
- "US Attorney Opens Investigations Into California's Elections," Associated Press, June 5, 2026.
- Heritage Foundation Voter Fraud Database, California entries, Norman Hall and Richard Howard cases, 2020.
- Daniel Greenfield, "The Urgent Case for Fixing California's Broken Elections," The Spectator, June 2026.