The chairman of the Senate's chief investigative subcommittee is pressing the Justice Department and FBI to open an immediate probe into allegations that petition-gathering firms paid homeless people in Los Angeles cash and cigarettes to register to vote, a scheme that may have sent mail-in ballots to addresses where those voters never lived.
Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter dated August 10 to Attorney General Todd Blanche urging federal law enforcement to act on what Johnson called "serious allegations" of ballot petition signature fraud centered on Skid Row, Just the News reported. Johnson also asked the department to brief his committee on any existing federal efforts to investigate and prosecute the individuals and companies involved.
Two firms, Urban Signers and 1 Moore Petition, LLC, sit at the center of the allegations. Investigative journalist James O'Keefe identified both entities in testimony and presented undercover video footage showing Urban Signers leader Franck Tessemo allegedly admitting that his company's petitioners use what he called "incentives", cash and cigarettes, to secure signatures on ballot petitions from homeless individuals.
Johnson's letter did not arrive in a vacuum. A woman from Marina Del Rey, California, had already admitted in a plea agreement entered in May that she illegally paid people on Skid Row to register to vote so they could sign ballot petitions. Because many of those homeless individuals lacked a fixed address, she used her own former address for their registrations.
That detail carries a specific downstream risk. California sends mail-in ballots to every registered voter who has an address on file. The woman acknowledged that the practice could have resulted in ballots being mailed to locations where the registered voters did not actually live, creating exactly the kind of loose, unmonitored ballot trail that federal prosecutors have been scrutinizing in the state.
Paying someone to register to vote is a federal crime under the United States Code, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
Johnson noted in his letter that O'Keefe is already cooperating with a United States attorney to investigate ballot fraud. But the senator pushed for a wider response, urging the FBI and other federal agencies to join the effort rather than leaving it to a single prosecutor's office.
In his letter to Blanche, Johnson framed the request in direct terms:
"To the extent that investigations are not already underway, I write to urge the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to immediately investigate these serious allegations in order to protect the integrity of our elections."
Johnson specifically asked the DOJ to provide a briefing on federal efforts to investigate and prosecute not just the unnamed individuals involved but also Urban Signers and 1 Moore Petition, LLC, the two firms O'Keefe flagged. The letter signals that Johnson views the existing plea deal and undercover footage as grounds for a broader federal inquiry, not a closed case.
California's election integrity has been a recurring flashpoint. Former President Trump has accused California Democrats of rigging vote counts, and the state's universal mail-in ballot system has drawn sustained criticism from Republicans who argue it invites exactly the kind of abuse Johnson's letter describes.
Several key questions remain unanswered. The Justice Department and FBI have not publicly responded to Johnson's letter. The specific ballot petitions targeted by the alleged scheme have not been identified in available reporting. And the scope of the fraud, how many homeless individuals were paid, how many registrations were filed at false addresses, and how many ballots may have been mailed to the wrong locations, remains unknown.
The identity of the Marina Del Rey woman who entered the plea deal has not been made public, nor has the court that handled her case. The full extent of Tessemo's statements in the undercover footage has not been released beyond his use of the word "incentives" to describe the payments.
A recent federal appeals court ruling cleared the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with an election-mail overhaul requiring voter lists and ballot barcodes, a reform designed to tighten the chain of custody on mailed ballots. That kind of safeguard is precisely what the Skid Row allegations suggest has been missing.
What Johnson is describing is not a partisan hypothetical. A woman already pleaded guilty. Undercover footage exists. A U.S. attorney is already involved. The question is whether the Justice Department treats this as a one-off plea deal or as the visible edge of something larger.
California's system has faced persistent questions about whether its universal mail-in ballot policy creates vulnerabilities that bad actors can exploit. The Skid Row allegations suggest the answer is yes, and that the people most easily exploited are those with the least power to object.
When the system makes it profitable to hand cigarettes to a homeless man in exchange for a signature, and then routes a ballot to an address he has never seen, the failure is not theoretical. It is a policy choice with real consequences, and the people living on Skid Row deserve better than to be treated as raw material for someone else's petition quota.
