[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Four men have admitted to paying homeless people cash and cigarettes in exchange for forged signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms in Los Angeles' Skid Row neighborhood.
Richard Howard, Louis Thomas Wise, Christopher Joseph Williams and Nickey Demelvin were arrested in November 2018 for their participation in the voter fraud scheme during the election that year and in 2016.
The LA County District Attorney's Office on Wednesday announced that Howard, 64, and Wise, 37, pleaded no contest to one felony count each of registration of a fictitious person and subscribing a fictitious name or the name of another to an initiative petition.
Williams, 41, and Huntley, 45, likewise pleaded no contest to one felony count of circulating an initiative or petition containing false, forged or fictitious names.
Howard received a suspended sentence of three years in state prison and three years of formal probation. Wise received a suspended sentence of 16 months in state prison and three years of formal probation. Williams and Huntley were each sentenced to three years of formal probation.
I.e. No jail time. Let's play Name That Party.
The men were accused alongside five other people of soliciting hundreds of false and forged signatures in Skid Row, an impoverished area with more than 5,000 homeless people living in tents and under tarps.
The group allegedly set up tables near shelters and soup kitchens to lure people in and offer them $1 and cigarettes to sign the ballot petitions and voter registration forms in what prosecutors called 'an assault on our democracy'.
A fifth defendant, Norman Hall, 62, pleaded guilty to one felony count of circulating a petition with false, forged or fictitious names in February and was sentenced to a year in jail.
The four remaining defendants - Kirkland Kauzava Washington, 38; Harold Bennett, 53; Rose Makeda Sweeney, 42; and Jakara Fati Mardis, 35 - are still facing charges. 
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