James Brass Petition Fraud Case: Which California Initiatives Were Involved, and Did Fake Signatures Actually Count?

Federal prosecutors have not publicly identified the California initiatives allegedly involved in the James Brass petition-fraud case. In fact, a senior federal prosecutor now says Brass and his team gathered signatures for roughly a dozen petitions, some of which eventually made it onto a ballot. Prosecutors also say they know who hired and paid Brass but are intentionally withholding that identity while the investigation continues.^[1][2]

That still leaves an important distinction: there is no public evidence showing that forged signatures were placed on all of those petitions, that a specific alleged forgery was accepted as valid by county election officials, or that the alleged scheme caused any ballot measure to qualify.

The federal indictment alleges something narrower but still serious. Prosecutors say Brass, Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron used real registered voters’ identities to manufacture initiative-petition signatures, with Brass and Herron then falsely certifying that the genuine voters had signed in their presence.^[1:1]

This was alleged fraud in the process of qualifying proposed laws for a ballot. It is not an allegation that defendants cast election ballots in other voters’ names.

(Department of Justice)

Prosecutors now say there were roughly a dozen petitions—not just one

Early coverage created the impression that investigators were withholding the identity of a single mysterious ballot initiative.

The fuller picture is more complicated.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli told ABC7 on September 11 that Brass and his team gathered signatures for roughly a dozen petitions and that some of those petitions made it onto a ballot. He did not identify the measures.^[2:1] (ABC 7 Chicago)

That statement resolves one question but creates another.

Working on approximately a dozen petitions does not mean prosecutors are alleging forged signatures on approximately a dozen petitions.

Professional petition circulators commonly carry multiple initiatives simultaneously. The public indictment alleges that Brass’s operation used registered voters’ identities to create fraudulent signatures, but it does not provide a measure-by-measure accounting showing which petition sheets contained alleged forgeries.^[1:2]

That distinction matters because otherwise an accurate statement—

Brass’s team worked on some petitions that later reached a ballot

—can easily become the unsupported claim—

forged Brass signatures put those measures on the ballot.

The second claim has not been established.

What the federal indictment actually alleges

A federal grand jury indicted James Brass, 47, also known as “Lord”; Courtney Price, 49; and Jateisha Herron, 33 on September 9.

All three are charged with conspiracy to commit identity fraud in furtherance of a state felony. Brass and Price—not Herron—also face a substantive identity-fraud count tied to the alleged use of one victim’s identity on February 27.^[1:3][3]

Brass pleaded not guilty at his initial appearance on September 10 and was released on a $10,000 bond. His trial was scheduled for November 2 as of that appearance.^[4]

An indictment is an accusation, not a finding of guilt. The defendants are presumed innocent unless prosecutors prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.

The indictment describes Brass as both a petition coordinator and circulator who managed other signature gatherers. It says he controlled Pinnacle Brass LLC and a bank account in that company’s name, while Price and Herron worked as petition circulators under him.^[1:4]

The alleged February 27 Skid Row operation

According to prosecutors, the conspiracy ran from no later than February through at least August 2026.

The indictment alleges that on February 27, Brass and Price established a petition-signing operation on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, accessed a voter database, searched for registered voters’ names and addresses, and gave that information to third-party signers—including by writing identities on scraps of paper.^[1:5]

Those people were then allegedly paid to copy the voters’ information onto initiative petitions and sign the registered voters’ names rather than their own.^[1:6]

Prosecutors further allege that Brass and Herron later signed circulator declarations falsely certifying that they had personally witnessed the real voters sign the petitions.

The indictment quotes an alleged March 5 instruction from Brass telling Herron to claim signatures had been collected at locations between Inglewood and Torrance and to “NEVER EVER SAY DOWN TOWN [sic] LA.”^[1:7]

That instruction, if proved, would be strong evidence that Brass wanted the actual collection location concealed. It does not, by itself, show that the coordinators or petition-management company above him knew about the alleged fraud.

Who hired and paid James Brass?

The indictment calls the company “Petition Company 1.”

It alleges that Brass worked through several coordinators connected to that company, turned petition sheets over to those coordinators, and received about $41,600 through the alleged operation. Petition Company 1 allegedly reimbursed coordinators who paid Brass.^[1:8]

ABC7 directly asked Essayli who hired and paid Brass.

His answer was:

“We know who did, but we’re not releasing that information right now.”

Essayli said the investigation is ongoing and that prosecutors would charge additional people if evidence shows they knowingly participated.^[2:2] (ABC 7 Chicago)

That is an important reason not to reverse-engineer an accusation against a particular petition company from campaign-finance records alone.

Campaign committees publicly report enormous payments to professional petition firms. Brass may have operated several contractual layers below the campaign itself. A payment trail can establish a business relationship; it cannot by itself establish knowledge of criminal conduct.

No public record reviewed for this article is sufficient to responsibly identify Petition Company 1.

Was California Proposition 40 one of the petitions?

Possibly, but the public evidence does not establish it.

This theory has an understandable origin.

In March, O’Keefe Media Group published undercover footage from Skid Row showing multiple petition-gathering activities. One petition was described as imposing a 5% tax on billionaires for health care.^[5]

That closely matches the measure now numbered Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time tax of up to 5% on certain taxpayers with more than $1 billion in covered assets and devote most of the proceeds to health care.^[6] (O’Keefe Media Group)

But that is not enough to conclude Brass forged Proposition 40 signatures.

The same Skid Row investigation documented multiple petitions. Later footage showing the alleged identity-forgery process did not publicly establish which initiative was printed on every petition sheet being signed. And prosecutors now say Brass’s team handled roughly a dozen petitions.

Most importantly, no indictment, court filing or campaign record located for this article directly connects Brass or Pinnacle Brass to Proposition 40.

Proposition 40 therefore remains a plausible subject of public speculation, not an identified fraud-affected measure.

What was the voter database?

The indictment provides more information about the database than most news reports have explained.

Prosecutors say Petition Company 1 maintained a database containing registered California voters’ information supplied by the California Secretary of State. It contained voters’ names and addresses and also tracked whether someone had already signed a particular initiative.^[1:9]

Petition-company coordinators allegedly used it for legitimate operational purposes: confirming that a signer was registered, matching petition information to state voter records and identifying duplicate signatures.^[1:10]

That makes an important difference.

There is no public evidence that somebody hacked California’s voter system

California voter-registration data is restricted, but it is not secret in the sense that no outside political organization can obtain it.

State law permits candidates, initiative and referendum committees, and people using the information for qualifying election, political, journalistic, scholarly or governmental purposes to request voter-registration files.^[7]

A statewide voter file can contain names, dates of birth, registration information, addresses, precincts, contact information and party preference.^[7:1] (California Secretary of State)

The allegation, therefore, is not that defendants hacked VoteCal or penetrated an election database.

The alleged abuse was using legitimate voter information for an illegitimate purpose: finding identities that would make falsified petition entries correspond to actual registered voters.

Did the voter database contain people’s real signatures?

The voter-registration file released by the California Secretary of State does not include voters’ signatures.

The Secretary of State explicitly excludes driver’s-license numbers, state identification numbers, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, unique identifiers and “signature or digitized signature image” from voter-registration files released to authorized requesters.^[7:2] (California Secretary of State)

That fact closes an important logical gap.

Using real names and addresses could allegedly help fabricated petition entries survive checks confirming that a person exists, is registered and lives at the listed address.

But the ordinary state voter file would not give the forger a copy of the real voter’s handwriting to imitate.

California counties have access to signature specimens in voter-registration records when performing actual signature verification. Petition-management firms receiving the statewide voter file do not receive those signature images.

Was the database SigValid?

There is evidence pointing in that direction, but it is not proven by the indictment.

O’Keefe Media Group’s March 31 undercover report said footage appeared to show petition workers logging into online.sigvalid.com, searching registered voters and supplying retrieved names and addresses to other people who then signed petitions.^[8]

Several months later, the Brass indictment independently described a strikingly similar mechanism: workers using a database based on state voter information, searching real voters and supplying their identities to third-party petition signers.^[1:11] (O’Keefe Media Group)

That chronological corroboration gives the undercover footage substantial evidentiary value.

But the public indictment does not use the name SigValid. It calls the system only the “Voter Database.”

The defensible conclusion is therefore:

SigValid appears in the undercover reporting and appears functionally similar to the system described by prosecutors, but the public indictment does not establish that SigValid was Petition Company 1’s database or identify who controlled the account being used.

How California actually checks initiative signatures

Understanding whether forged signatures “counted” requires understanding that California uses the word count at several different stages.

1. Raw count

California defines the raw count as the total number of unverified signatures submitted to election officials.^[9]

At this stage, a signature’s presence does not mean officials have determined it is genuine.

2. Random sampling

If enough raw signatures have been submitted for a statewide initiative, county election officials generally verify a random sample. State regulations require that every filed signature receive an equal opportunity to be selected.^[9:1]

Officials determine how many signatures in the sample are valid and calculate a validity percentage.

3. Statistical projection

The sample’s validity percentage is then applied to the larger raw count, with an additional adjustment for duplicate signatures, to estimate how many valid signatures the entire petition contains.^[9:2] (California Secretary of State)

That means most signatures in a petition drive may never be individually examined if the initiative qualifies through random sampling.

4. The 95% and 110% thresholds

If the projected valid-signature total is below 95% of the number required, the measure fails.

If it falls between 95% and 110%, counties must conduct a full check, meaning every signature is verified.

If a statewide initiative’s projected valid total exceeds 110% of the required number, it becomes eligible for the ballot without that full verification.^[10] (California Secretary of State)

That distinction is essential to answering what happened in the Brass case.

Did the allegedly fake signatures actually “count”?

No publicly released evidence establishes that a particular Brass-associated forgery was examined by county election officials and accepted as a genuine voter signature.

But the answer depends on what “count” means.

The indictment says Brass and Herron allegedly knew their false certifications would result in fraudulent signatures being “counted in connection with” an effort to place an initiative on the ballot.^[1:12]

That describes prosecutors’ allegation about the purpose and expected consequence of the scheme. It is not a statement that investigators have identified a particular forged signature that a county later validated.

There is an additional statistical wrinkle.

If an allegedly fraudulent signature entered a county’s raw count but was never selected in the random sample, it could remain among the unexamined signatures to which the sample’s overall validity rate is applied. In that limited mathematical sense, an unexamined bad signature could remain inside the population used to produce the projected total.^[9:3]

But that is not the same thing as an election official examining that specific signature and declaring it genuine.

Random sampling estimates the validity of the entire population rather than authenticating every entry.

Would using a real voter’s name and address guarantee that the signature passed?

No.

California regulations require election officials verifying a petition signature to compare it with signatures in the voter’s registration record.^[11]

Officials can consider characteristics including slant, cursive versus printing, size, letter formation, spacing, connecting strokes, writing speed and pen lifts.^[11:1]

An exact match is not required. State rules begin with a presumption that the signature is the voter’s and allow officials to accept signatures with sufficiently similar characteristics. A signature showing multiple significant and obvious differences receives additional review; rejection requires two election officials to agree that it differs from the registration signatures under the standard specified by the regulations.^[11:2] (California Secretary of State)

So a forgery could theoretically survive a visual comparison.

But the fact that something could pass does not establish that a Brass-associated forgery did pass.

The regulations contain another directly relevant rule: when the signer does not use their own handwriting to write their name, residence address or signature, the entry may be included in the initial raw count but is not subject to signature verification, except for specified disability and signature-stamp situations.^[11:3] (California Secretary of State)

The alleged Skid Row process—one person being given another voter’s identity and signing that voter’s name—would therefore violate exactly the sort of authorship requirement the verification rules contemplate.

Did the alleged scheme put any proposition on the ballot?

There is currently no public evidence establishing that it did.

Essayli’s statement that some of the roughly dozen petitions Brass’s team worked on made the ballot establishes that Brass’s legitimate or allegedly illegitimate signature-gathering operation intersected with successful petition drives.

It does not establish causation.

To determine whether alleged fraud actually changed a qualification outcome, investigators or journalists would need at least four missing pieces of information:

the affected initiative, the number of fraudulent signatures submitted, what happened to those signatures during county verification, and the measure’s qualification result after removing them.

Without those facts, subtracting an assumed number of “fake signatures” from a qualification total is not valid analysis.

There is another trap. Suppose an initiative exceeded the 110% random-sample threshold by 20,000 projected signatures. It would be wrong to assume that finding 20,001 bad signatures automatically means it should have failed.

Dropping below 110% but remaining above 95% ordinarily sends the initiative to a full signature check. It does not automatically disqualify the measure.^[10:1]

This is petition fraud—not evidence that fraudulent election ballots were cast

The distinction is not semantic.

The state-law felony underlying the federal charges is California Elections Code §18613, which prohibits putting another person’s name—or a fictitious name—on an initiative, referendum or recall petition.^[12]

A petition signature helps determine whether a proposed measure gets presented to voters.

An election ballot records a person’s actual vote on whether that measure, candidate or other question should prevail.

The Brass indictment does not allege that defendants voted November ballots under stolen identities, changed registered voters’ selections, submitted fraudulent vote-by-mail ballots or altered an election tabulation.^[1:13]

Calling the alleged conduct “fake petition signatures” is accurate shorthand when clearly attributed to prosecutors.

Calling it proof that fraudulent votes were cast would go beyond the case.

The undercover investigation was substantially corroborated—but some of its legal framing was wrong

The O’Keefe Media Group reporting deserves more careful treatment than either blind acceptance or automatic dismissal.

Its footage was published in March, almost six months before the September indictment. It depicted an alleged mechanism involving real voter identities, searchable voter information, third-party signers and cash payments. The later federal indictment independently alleges an unusually similar method.^[1:14][8:1]

That chronology materially strengthens the footage as evidence of the alleged underlying activity.

But some of OMG’s accompanying legal claims went beyond what the statutes say.

Its March 17 report stated that paying somebody to “register to vote or sign a petition” was a federal felony under 52 U.S.C. §10307(c).^[5:1]

The federal statute prohibits paying for registration to vote or for voting in covered federal elections. It does not say that paying someone to sign a California initiative petition is itself a federal offense under that provision.^[13]

California separately addresses petition payments. Elections Code §18603 makes offering money or other consideration to someone in exchange for that person’s petition signature a misdemeanor.^[14] The more serious statute at the center of the Brass indictment, §18613, makes signing another person’s or a fictitious name to an initiative petition a felony.^[12:1] (Justia Law)

The useful approach is therefore to credit the undercover reporting where later evidence corroborates it while independently checking its legal conclusions.

Could a ballot measure be challenged if investigators eventually identify enough bad signatures?

Potentially.

The California Supreme Court has recognized that procedural challenges alleging an initiative failed to obtain the required number of qualified signatures can be resolved before an election. But courts also exercise substantial caution before removing a measure that appears to have qualified.^[15]

Once voters have actually voted, California courts have been significantly more reluctant to overturn an election because of petition-circulation defects.^[15:1] (Justia Law)

That issue remains hypothetical in the Brass case because prosecutors have not publicly identified a measure that lacked enough valid signatures after accounting for the alleged conduct.

What remains unknown

Several questions are now more important than trying to guess a proposition from circumstantial clues.

Prosecutors have not disclosed which roughly dozen petitions Brass’s team worked on, which subset allegedly contained forged signatures, the identity of Petition Company 1, the identities of its three unnamed coordinators, the total number of allegedly forged signatures, whether SigValid was the database described in the indictment, whether allegedly fraudulent sheets were ultimately filed with counties, whether any were randomly sampled or individually accepted, or whether removing them would alter any qualification result.

They also have not accused an initiative proponent or Petition Company 1 of knowingly participating in the alleged forgery scheme.

Indeed, Essayli’s statement that investigators know who paid Brass but are withholding that identity while determining whether anybody else had knowledge is a reason to avoid treating an upstream commercial relationship as evidence of criminal complicity.^[2:3]

Those unknowns are significant—but they do not make the known allegations trivial.

The indictment describes an alleged system specifically designed to place real registered voters’ names and addresses onto petitions they did not sign, then conceal that process behind false circulator declarations and the ordinary commercial petition-gathering chain.

The bottom line

Federal prosecutors allege a deliberate California petition-forgery operation built around the identities of real registered voters.

The strongest evidence currently supports that narrow conclusion.

Prosecutors say Brass’s team worked on roughly a dozen petition drives and that some eventually reached ballots. They say they know which company hired and paid him. But they have intentionally withheld those identities, and the public record still does not establish that allegedly forged signatures appeared on every petition Brass’s team handled—or even identify which measures contained them.^[1:15][2:4]

There is likewise no public evidence yet showing that a specific alleged forgery was accepted as genuine by a county election official or that alleged fraud changed whether any initiative qualified.

That could change as the criminal case produces additional filings, discovery disputes, testimony or charges.

For now, the evidence supports neither extreme: it would be wrong to dismiss the alleged conduct as harmless merely because California verifies signatures, and it would be equally wrong to claim that prosecutors have proved fake petition signatures put a particular proposition on the ballot.

References and Further Reading

Primary court and federal records

United States v. James Brass, Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron — Federal Indictment — The central primary document. It contains the charged conspiracy, Pinnacle Brass relationship, voter-database description, alleged payments and February–March overt acts.

U.S. Attorney’s Office — Victorville Man Arrested on Federal Indictment Alleging Stolen Voter Identities — DOJ’s official September 10 announcement. Useful for the charges and government’s public position, but less detailed than the indictment.

California election rules and voter data

California Secretary of State — Voter Registration Information File Request — Authoritative explanation of who may access California voter data, what an authorized voter file contains and the explicit exclusion of voter signature images.

California Secretary of State — Petition Processing and Signature Verification Regulations — Governs petition handwriting, addresses and comparison of petition signatures against voter-registration records.

California Secretary of State — Random Sampling Verification Methodology — Defines raw counts, random samples and the mathematical projection of valid signatures.

California Secretary of State — Initiatives and Referenda Pending Signature Verification — Explains when random sampling is sufficient and when a full verification is required.

Independent and original reporting

ABC7 Los Angeles — Brass Team Worked on Roughly a Dozen Petitions — Contains Essayli’s important disclosure that the operation gathered signatures for roughly a dozen petitions, some of which made a ballot, and that investigators know but have not released who hired Brass.

Los Angeles Times — Skid Row Residents Were Paid to Sign Petitions With Stolen Identities, Feds Charge — Independent courthouse reporting on Brass’s plea, bond and initial procedural status.

O’Keefe Media Group — March 31 Skid Row Voter-Database Investigation — Original undercover material showing what the outlet identified as a SigValid interface. Valuable because the footage predates the indictment, but its interpretations should be independently checked.

Relevant law

California Elections Code §18613 — Signing Another Person’s Name to a Petition — The California felony prosecutors identify as the underlying state offense.

California Elections Code §18603 — Paying Someone for Their Petition Signature — Separately makes giving consideration for someone’s initiative, referendum or recall petition signature a misdemeanor.

52 U.S.C. §10307 — Federal Voting Rights Act Prohibited Acts — Useful for distinguishing federal prohibitions involving payment for voter registration or voting from California’s separate petition-signature rules.

Costa v. Superior Court — California Supreme Court, 2006 — Leading California authority explaining why procedural challenges to initiative qualification can sometimes be resolved before an election.

Editorial currency note: This article reflects publicly available records through September 11, 2026. The Brass prosecution is active, and the identities of the initiatives, Petition Company 1, its coordinators and potentially additional participants could be disclosed in later court filings or investigative announcements.