Since the Los Angeles mayoral primary election last week, unsupported conspiracy claims have flooded social media about how reality TV personality Spencer Pratt fell out of the race.
One claiming that Pratt received zero votes in an update on election night was quickly debunked by the U.S. attorney’s office. Now another story has taken root: that the ballots of homeless people are somehow fraudulently responsible for his loss.
Many spreading this story are doing so with little or no evidence of wrongdoing and are instead relying on information that is false or can be explained by more benign reasons.
One TikTok user, laneedsspencerpratt, posted video interviews with three individuals identified as Skid Row residents who said they were paid a few dollars to vote for Mayor Karen Bass. The incumbent came in first to advance to the runoff with Councilmember Nithya Raman. Pratt, who had an early lead over Raman, was bumped to third place as more votes were counted.
“How much they pay you?” the interviewer asked a woman in one video.
“Five dollars,” the woman responded.
“They told you to vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman?”
“Karen Bass,” she said.
L.A. County election officials responded on X to the videos, saying that there was no evidence the woman voted for Bass for $5 and that the woman is registered to vote in Inglewood, a separate city adjacent to Los Angeles.
Alex Stack, a Bass campaign spokesman, said in a statement the idea that Bass’ campaign paid for votes is “absurd.”
“It’s the same type of false election misinformation and disinformation put out by Trump after he lost the presidency,” he said. “The Bass campaign concurs with the LA County Registrar saying this issue is false.”
On Wednesday, Times reporters went to the area where those TikTok videos were filmed, but did not find those three individuals. Experts said one-off cases like those, even if true, would be unlikely to change the outcome of an election.
“A vote here or there that might have been a little fishy in Skid Row — that’s not going to be enough to turn the outcome of an election in which we had over 750,000 people voting,” said Christopher R. Hallenbrook, associate professor of political science at Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Rick Hasen, a professor of law and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, said that those instances should be investigated — and given President Trump’s relentless claims of voter fraud and the pressure he puts on U.S. attorneys, he is certain they will be. But he said the idea that it happened on a scale that would change the results is outlandish.
“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 pretty expensive and risky way to try to sway an election,” he said, later adding: “You’re just talking about a ridiculous, vast conspiracy.”
“The simplest reason why Spencer Pratt came in third is because there are many fewer Republicans and Republican leaders in the city of Los Angeles, which is a diverse Democratic city,” Hasen said.
The Times on Wednesday interviewed 20 residents of Skid Row about the election. Some said they live on the streets, others in shelters or apartments in the area. None said anyone approached them offering money to vote for a specific candidate. Most said they didn’t vote and had not been approached in any manner about the election.
When told of the stories circulating on social media, one woman’s jaw dropped — she said she’d never heard of people paying for votes on Skid Row, not in this election or any prior one.
“They’re not going to approach nobody like me, because I’ll be looking at them like they’re crazy,” said the woman, who lives in a building in Skid Row and identified herself only as Kimberly. “I would not vote for anybody if they’re offering money, hell no.”
Michele Brewster, sitting in a wheelchair on San Julian Street, said she did not see any candidates — or anyone at all — campaign on Skid Row or talk with homeless people about the election, much less pay them to vote. And if they had, she said, she would have heard about it through the grapevine.
“I virtually think that the voting process completely passed up Skid Row,” Brewster said.
A handful of people interviewed by The Times said they had seen workers gathering signatures for ballot petitions, offering cash to persuade homeless people to sign, with some saying the workers also registered people to vote, which is a requirement to sign a ballot petition.
Three people told The Times they accepted a couple dollars to sign, with one saying he signed multiple signatures using various names and received $10.
That scheme has landed people in court and has been pointed to by some as reason to believe voter fraud occurred last week.
In May, the U.S. Justice Department announceda Marina del Rey woman admitted in a plea agreement that she illegally paid people on Skid Row to register to vote so they could sign ballot petitions, because she was paid based on the number of voter signatures she was able to collect.
In some cases, when the homeless individuals didn’t have an address, she provided them with her former address in Los Angeles, and since California sends mail-in ballots to all voters with an address, ballots could have been sent to where the voters didn’t live, the plea agreement says.
According to the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, voter registration records are checked against U.S. Postal Service records and mismatches render a voter inactive and unable to vote until they provide adequate information. Similarly, if a mail-in ballot can’t be delivered to an address on the voter’s file or if it is sent to an address where someone doesn’t live and is returned, that voter is also marked inactive.
All mail-in ballots received also undergo a signature verification process to ensure they were filled out by the voter whose ballot it is, the county election office said.
In California, mail-in ballots can arrive within seven days after election day and be counted, but they generally must be postmarked by election day. In responses to social media claims, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk said on X if there is no postmark, but a voter dated their ballot on or prior to election day, a ballot can still be counted, but “the number of ballots without postmarks are very low.”
Conservative media personality Benny Johnson claimed L.A. used the “homeless industrial complex” to rig the election against Pratt in a widely shared video post, saying without evidence that there is a scheme to withhold ballots meant for homeless people and wait to submit them until it is clear how many votes the chosen candidate needs. He also falsely said Raman was “winning Skid Row” as he showed a precinct level map of results in and around downtown Los Angeles.
In fact, the precinct level map showed Bass, not Raman, had the most votes across the precincts covering Skid Row, which is home to the highest concentration of homeless people in the country.
Raman was up in other areas of downtown and some adjacent neighborhoods such as Echo Park, home to many young renters who make up a core of Raman’s base.
The precinct level data he used, however, was preliminary. The map shown in the June 8 post only included votes counted through the afternoon following election day.
Since then, more votes have been counted and Bass still has the most votes across Skid Row, though the results are still preliminary.
Johnson did not return requests for comment sent to email addresses associated with him and his show.
Pratt on X suggested the gap between him and Raman was closed through votes of homeless Angelenos.
The California Post reported that First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli said he would launch an investigation based on a report by the news site that thousands of people were registered to vote at homeless shelters, including at sites that had more registered voters than beds. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
In its report, the Post said that the Midnight Mission on Skid Row had 1,160 people registered at its address but that the shelter’s website said it had only 120 beds.
According to the California secretary of state, people who are homeless can register to vote using the location where they spend most of their time, whether that be a shelter or intersection.
Georgia Hawley, chief communications officer for the mission, said the mission actually has 296 beds and about 125 more people sleep in its dining room or courtyard — and the people sleeping there aren’t always the same.
However, Hawley said services aren’t restricted to people sleeping on site. Those living on the street can use the mission to send and receive mail, take a shower, use the restroom and get food, with anywhere from 500 to 1,000 people showing up for each meal.
Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the county recorder’s office, cautioned against comparing shelter beds with voter registration records.
“Voter registration records do not indicate whether an individual is currently residing at or receiving services from a facility,” he said in an email.
If living on the streets, homeless voters can use a P.O. Box or a service provider’s address to receive mail-in ballots, and if they can’t provide an address to receive mail, they can vote in person.
“People who are unhoused have the right to vote, just like everyone else,” Hasen said. “To the extent that you see outreach trying to register unhoused people to vote, I think that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Times staff writer Sandhya Kambhampati contributed to this report.
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