Since last week’s Los Angeles mayoral primary, unsubstantiated conspiracy claims have flooded social media about how reality TV host Spencer Pratt dropped out of the race.
One claim that Pratt received zero votes in the election night review was quickly dismissed by the U.S. attorney’s office. Now another issue has come into play: that the homeless people’s votes are guilty of fraud in some way for his loss.
Many who spread this story do so with little or no evidence of wrongdoing and instead rely on false or implausible information for the best of reasons.
TikTok user laneedspencerpratt posted video interviews with three people identified as Skid Row residents who said they were paid a few dollars to vote for Mayor Karen Bass. The incumbent entered first to move forward with councilor Nithya Raman. Pratt, who quickly took the lead over Raman, came in third place as the most votes were counted.
Martika Johnson-Rogers speaks to reporters on Skid Row on Wednesday.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
“How much do they pay you?” the interviewer asked a woman in one video.
“Five dollars,” answered the woman.
“They told you to vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman?”
“Karen Bass,” she said.
LA County election officials responded with an X to the videos, saying there was no evidence the woman voted for Bass for $5 and that the woman was registered to vote in Inglewood, a separate city near Los Angeles.
Alex Stack, a spokesman for Bass’s campaign, said in a statement that Bass’ idea that he paid for votes “makes no sense.”
“It’s the same kind of election misinformation and disinformation that Trump put out after he lost the presidency,” he said. “The Bass campaign agrees with the LA County Registrar that this story is false.”
On Wednesday, Times reporters went to the location where the TikTok videos were recorded, but could not find the three people. Experts say cases like that, even if true, cannot change the outcome of the election.
“A vote here or there that might have been a little bit on Skid Row — that’s not going to be enough to change the outcome of an election where we had over 750,000 people vote,” said Christopher R. Hallenbrook, associate professor of political science at Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Rick Hasen, a law professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, said those charges should be investigated — and given President Trump’s relentless claims of voter fraud and the pressure he’s putting on U.S. lawmakers, he’s sure they will. But he said the idea that it happened on a scale that would change the results was amazing.
“If you were going to pay people $3 or $5 to vote, and you had to pay tens of thousands of them … it would be a very expensive and dangerous way to try to influence an election,” he said, later adding: “You’re just talking about a ridiculous, big conspiracy.”
Mike Barnett, 70, speaks to reporters on Skid Row on Wednesday.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
“The simple reason why Spencer Pratt came in third place is because there are few Republican and Republican leaders in the city of Los Angeles, which is a divided city of the Democratic Alliance,” said Hasen.
The Times on Wednesday interviewed 20 Skid Row residents about the election. Some say they live on the streets, others in shelters or apartments in the area. No one said that someone came to them and gave them money to vote for a particular person. Most said they did not vote and were never contacted in any way about the election.
When she was told about the news spread on social media, one woman suddenly fainted – she said she had never heard of people paying for votes in Skid Row, not in this election or the previous one.
“They won’t go near someone like me because I’ll look at them like they’re crazy,” said the woman who lives in a building in Skid Row, who gave her name only as Kimberly. “I won’t vote for anybody if they give money, hell no.”
Michele Brewster, who sits in a wheelchair on San Julian Street, said she doesn’t see any candidates — or anyone else — campaigning on Skid Row or talking to homeless people about the election, let alone paying them to vote. And if they did, he said, he would hear about it on the grapevine.
“I think the voting system has completely bypassed Skid Row,” Brewster said.
Michele Brewster, who did not vote in the recent mayoral election, speaks to reporters on Skid Row.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
A number of people interviewed by The Times newspaper said they saw workers collecting signatures to apply for voting, giving money to persuade the homeless to sign, others said workers registered to vote, which is a requirement to sign a ballot.
Three people told The Times they received a few dollars for signing, and one said he signed many people using different names and received $10.
That plan has taken people to court and some have pointed to it as a reason to believe voter fraud occurred last week.
In May, the US Department of Justice announced that a Marina del Rey woman pleaded guilty to illegally paying people in Skid Row to register to vote in order to sign petitions, because she was paid based on the number of voter signatures she was able to collect.
In some cases, when homeless people didn’t have an address, he gave them his former address in Los Angeles, and since California sends mail-in ballots to all voters with an address, ballots could be mailed where voters don’t live, the plea agreement said.
According to the Registrar-Recorder/County of LA County, voter registration records are checked against US Postal Service records and a conflict disqualifies the voter from voting until they provide sufficient information. Similarly, if a mail-in ballot cannot be delivered to the address on file for the voter or if it is sent to a non-residential address and is returned, that voter is also marked as inactive.
All incoming ballots received are also undergoing a process to ensure that they are filled in by the correct voter, the county election office said.
In California, walk-in ballots can arrive within seven days after election day and be counted, but usually must be postmarked on election day. Responding to the claims on social media, the LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk said in X if there is no postmark, but the voter wrote their voting date on or before election day, the vote can still be counted, but “the number of ballots without postmarks is very low.”
Media host Benny Johnson said LA used a “homeless industrial complex” to rig the election against Pratt in a widely shared video post, saying without evidence that there was a system withholding votes for homeless people and waiting to cast them until it was clear how many votes the candidate needed. He also falsely claimed that Raman was “winning Skid Row” as he showed a map of the results level in downtown Los Angeles.
In fact, the precinct-level map showed that Bass, not Raman, had the most votes in the entire area that includes Skid Row, home to the nation’s largest homeless population.
Raman was located in other parts of the city and in nearby areas such as Echo Park, which is home to many of the young tenants who form the core of Raman’s base.
The ground-level data he used, however, was original. The map shown in the June 8 post only includes votes counted the afternoon after Election Day.
Since then, more votes have been tallied and Bass still has the most votes in all of Skid Row, although the results are still preliminary.
Johnson did not return requests for comment sent to email addresses associated with him and his program.
Pratt on X suggested that the gap between him and Raman was bridged by the votes of homeless Angelenos.
The California Post reported that First Assistant US Atty. Bill Essayli said he would launch an investigation based on a news site report that thousands of people had registered to vote in homeless shelters, including areas with more registered voters than beds. A spokesman for the US attorney’s office declined to comment.
Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign posters are seen on Skid Row.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
In its report, the Post said Midnight Mission on Skid Row had 1,160 people at its address but the shelter’s website said it only had 120 beds.
According to the California secretary of state, homeless people can register to vote using the place they spend most of their time, be it a shelter or the street.
Georgia Hawley, the mission’s communications officer, said the mission has 296 beds and about 125 people sleep in the dining room or in its courtyard – and the people who sleep there are not always the same.
However, Hawley said the services are not limited to people sleeping on the site. Those living on the street can use these machines to send and receive mail, shower, use the toilet and get food, with 500 to 1,000 people attending each meal.
Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the county recorder’s office, cautioned against comparing shelter beds to voter registration records.
“Voter registration records do not show that a person lives or receives assistance at a facility,” he said in an email.
If they live on the streets, homeless voters can use a PO Box or service provider’s address to receive incoming ballots, and if they can’t provide an address to receive mail, they can vote in person.
“Homeless people have the right to vote, just like everyone else,” Hasen said. “The way you see efforts to register homeless people to vote, I think that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Times staff writer Sandhya Kambhampati contributed to this report.
