Hundreds of live mail ballots for the November 3 midterm elections were found piled in an open hallway at a homeless shelter on Los Angeles' Skid Row, and the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles has confirmed that federal authorities are investigating election ballots there. A newspaper investigation published on Monday reported the discovery at The Midnight Mission, the shelter at 601 South San Pedro Street where 1,160 voters are registered to vote. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, whose office covers the Central District of California, confirmed the federal investigation when he was asked about ballots on Skid Row, though he declined to discuss The Midnight Mission specifically.
The ballots are the real thing, not samples or spares. California mails a ballot to every active registered voter in the state, and the envelopes found in the hallway were ballots delivered for voters registered at the shelter's address — people who live on the street or pass through the Mission and use it as their mailing address, which California law allows. The investigation said it authenticated a photograph of the piled ballots and independently confirmed the scene during a visit to the shelter on October 13. The shelter sits in the middle of Skid Row, the downtown district where thousands of homeless Angelenos live, and it handles a heavy daily flow of mail for people who have no other address.
Honesty matters here, because the picture is alarming enough without stretching it. The reporting does not allege that any of these ballots was filled out, stolen, altered or cast by someone other than the voter it was addressed to, and it does not say how many of the exposed ballots were later handed to their rightful voters. There have been no arrests and no charges in this matter, and the Justice Department and the FBI have issued no public statement about the shelter. What is established is narrower and still serious: hundreds of live ballots for a federal election sat piled in an open hallway, reachable by anyone passing through, eight days of voting still to go before Election Day.
The Midnight Mission says that is not how its mail is supposed to be handled. Georgia Hawley, the shelter's chief communications officer, said the organization's standard procedure is to keep election ballots behind locked doors until they are distributed to the people they are addressed to, and that she personally confirmed ballots were being stored securely when she visited the mail center. She said the shelter's limited mailroom space means deliveries have to be received, sorted and handed out throughout the day. The shelter has not explained how the photographed pile in the open hallway fits with that procedure.
For ordinary citizens, the stake in this is direct. A mail ballot is a citizen's vote in paper form, and it only works if it reaches the voter it belongs to and no one else. A ballot left lying in a hallway can be lost, damaged or taken — and a ballot that never reaches its voter is a citizen effectively stripped of their say in who governs them. Voters who register through a homeless shelter are citizens with the same right to vote as anyone in a house in the suburbs, and their ballots are worth exactly the same in the count. Loose handling anywhere in the chain — a post office, an apartment lobby, a shelter mailroom — puts lawful votes at risk, and every lawful vote put at risk dilutes the votes of everyone else.
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have been here before, in separate cases that must not be confused with the hallway discovery. Earlier this year, Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, a 64-year-old petition circulator from Marina del Rey, was federally charged with paying people to register to vote — a few dollars at a time, on Skid Row — and she agreed to plead guilty, facing up to five years in prison. In September, a federal grand jury indicted James Brass of Victorville and two others, Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron, alleging they paid Skid Row residents to sign ballot-initiative petitions using the stolen identities of real registered voters. Brass has pleaded not guilty and his trial is set for November. Those are charged cases with named defendants. The piled ballots at The Midnight Mission are, for now, an investigation with no accused — and that difference is exactly why the facts have to be stated carefully.
The separate fight over 20,000 ballots
The shelter investigation is one front in a wider federal push over California's ballots, and the other front produced a ruling on Monday — in a different case that has nothing to do with the Mission's hallway. On October 15, the Justice Department sued California and Los Angeles County, demanding that officials set aside the mail ballots of more than 20,000 voters the federal government says are "likely" noncitizens. The department had sent the state the list of names on October 13, built from federal immigration records and third-party data, and given officials 48 hours to review it. The office of Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan — the county's top election official — responded to the department on October 15, and the case landed before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Los Angeles.
The Justice Department asked Judge Carter for an emergency order forcing the ballots to be sequestered — held apart, uncounted — until each voter's citizenship could be verified. Carter set a hearing for Tuesday, October 27. The department decided that was not fast enough: on October 22 it appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the judge's failure to rule on its timeline amounted to a denial, and it asked the appeals court for an emergency injunction of its own. The three-judge panel heard arguments in a rare emergency Sunday session by video.
On Monday, the panel ruled 2-1 against the Justice Department. Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, held that the appeals court had no authority to step in because the district court had not yet ruled — the department, they wrote, had failed to give Judge Carter an adequate chance to consider its request before running upstairs. The majority called the government's claimed emergency "at least in part, a self-constructed one," pointing to the department's own delay in filing suit. Judge Bennett added that even on the merits he would have refused the demand, warning it carried a real risk of disenfranchising eligible voters, and Judge Sanchez wrote that the injunction would transform California's election rules in the middle of an election already underway. Judge Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented, arguing the federal government must be able to act to stop noncitizens from voting.
What the ruling means for November 3 is this: for now, the 20,000 disputed ballots stay in the normal count. County officials keep processing them like every other ballot, because no court has ordered them held apart. But the Justice Department's lawsuit itself is alive — Monday's ruling only decided that the department jumped the gun procedurally, and the fight goes straight back to Judge Carter, who hears the department's emergency request on Tuesday. A ruling from him, one way or the other, is the next decision that could change how those ballots are treated before Election Day.
And the question of a further appeal is, as of Monday night, unanswered. The Justice Department has not publicly said whether it will take the 9th Circuit's ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and no appeal to the Supreme Court has been filed or announced in the reporting on the ruling. Legal observers note the option exists — emergency appeals from the 9th Circuit go to Justice Elena Kagan — but the department has stated no position, and its immediate battle is the Tuesday hearing in front of Judge Carter. Anyone claiming the department has already decided to appeal, or has decided not to, is ahead of the facts.
These two stories — ballots piled in a shelter hallway, and a court fight over 20,000 names on a federal list — are separate matters, and ProfiloPolitics will keep them separate. They meet at one point only: both are about whether the ballots of American citizens are handled carefully enough to deserve the public's trust. A citizen's vote is diluted when a ballot that should not count slips in, and it is silenced when a lawful ballot is lost in a hallway pile or wrongly set aside on a bad list. Protecting the count means protecting both sides of that line at once, and this week, in Los Angeles, both sides of that line are being tested at the same time.
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