A federal prosecutor charged a California woman for paying homeless voters on Skid Row two dollars a signature.
Now Vice President JD Vance sat down with Joe Rogan to expose exactly what California election rigging looks like.
Those accusations line up with a federal case that's already exposed how those ballots get manufactured.
Vance Compares Downtown Los Angeles to a Third World Country
Vance sat down with Rogan and described his first trip to Skid Row, the roughly 50-block stretch of downtown Los Angeles that has held the densest concentration of homelessness in Los Angeles County for years.
He didn't soften it.
Vance told Rogan the neighborhood is "more like a Third-World country" than anything he ever thought America would become.
Nearly 4,000 people are homeless in that 50-block radius under Mayor Karen Bass, and the official count doesn't even capture the worst of it.
RAND researchers just clocked rough sleeping in the area at a four-year high, with almost every tent left standing in the surrounding neighborhoods now crammed into Skid Row alone.
Bass has run the city since 2022.
Vance Says the Mayor's Race Looked Designed to Shut Pratt Out
Rogan asked Vance the obvious question: why do the country's biggest, most broken cities keep electing the same party.
Vance gave him two reasons.
First, he pointed to Hollywood's cultural gravity, the influencers and celebrities who shape how young people vote long before those young people ever pay a property tax bill.
Second, he pointed to conservatives themselves, who increasingly pack up and leave for the suburbs rather than fight for the cities they grew up in.
Rogan pivoted to this year's Los Angeles mayoral primary, calling the outcome deeply suspicious.
Republican Spencer Pratt held second place behind Bass on election night, only to watch progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman pass him days later as California kept counting mail ballots that arrived after voters had gone home.
Vance didn't hold back either, telling Rogan it looked designed to push Pratt out and install Raman in second place instead.
The suspicion wasn't invented for the podcast.
The Justice Department has already charged a California woman, Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, with paying Skid Row residents to register and sign ballot petitions, sometimes using her own old addresses when the homeless voters had none.
That scheme opened the door for ballots to go out under the names of people who never lived there, since California mails a ballot automatically to every registered voter.
Separate Skid Row residents told reporters this year they were handed cash, two dollars in one case and five in another, and told to vote for Bass.
Voters face a ballot measure this November that would require government ID to vote in person and the last four digits of an ID number to cast a mail ballot, something 36 other states already demand.
Rogan doesn't believe there's any legitimate reason California resists it.
Vance Won't Write Off the State Democrats Are Running Into the Ground
Vance told Rogan California still represents the core of the American dream, and that abandoning it means abandoning something essential to the country itself.
That's the part Democrats running Sacramento and City Hall should find most uncomfortable.
Vance is arguing the people currently in charge of California, Bass chief among them, have driven a state Republicans still believe in into conditions the Vice President compares to the developing world.
A federal judge reached the same verdict on Skid Row back in 2021, ordering the city to shelter every woman and child there within 90 days after calling the crisis a shameful reality of official failure.
Four years and untold taxpayer dollars later, those same officials just got protected from a real electoral reckoning, propped up by late mail ballots and, according to federal charges, by cash handed straight to the homeless population living in the wreckage they created.
Vance didn't need talking points to make that connection on Rogan's show.
He just described what he saw.
Sources:
- Angelina Delfin, "'More Like a Third-World Country': JD Vance Sounds Off on California With Joe Rogan," Daily Signal, July 15, 2026.
- Angelina Delfin, "'They Paid Me to Vote': Homeless Residents Make Explosive Claims After Pratt's Loss," Daily Signal, June 11, 2026.
- U.S. Department of Justice, "California Woman Federally Charged with Paying Individuals, Including Homeless People on L.A.'s Skid Row, to Register to Vote," Office of Public Affairs press release, May 18, 2026.
- Ashley Carnahan, "LA City Councilwoman Previously Backed by DSA Running for Mayor in Primary Challenge to Former Ally Bass," Fox News, 2026.
- RAND Corporation, "Homelessness Holds Steady Across Three L.A. Neighborhoods as Rough Sleeping Reaches a Four-Year High," RAND press release, May 21, 2026.
