Some stakeholders in LA have exploited homeless voters –– and lax voting rules –– to entrench their power.

Now the Trump administration is investigating. 

Plainclothes federal agents spread through Skid Row this week to explore  possible election fraud –– including reports that homeless people were paid to complete voting forms, forge signatures and cast votes for left-wing candidates for mayor.

Once again, LA’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, has done great work probing allegations of fraud that state and local officials have scant incentive to address.

Let’s find out more.

Investigating alleged Skid Row voting bribes, along with other claims of election fraud in California, are a key step toward restoring public trust in Golden State elections. 

Since the June 2 primary, California’s been a global laughingstock for its lax guardrails on voting, ban on voter ID, slow system of late vote-counting, and anything-goes election process that’s so sloppy it’s hard to tell where the chaos ends and the fraud might begin.

Meanwhile, true to form, the LA City Council is plotting to make the mess worse. 

Zealot-left Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez led a council majority to advance a plan to let noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, vote in LA elections –– an insane proposal that would erase what few voting controls are left, dilute citizens’ voices, and deepen distrust of a broken electoral system.

After the June election, The California Post found thousands of homeless voters registered to vote at shelters where they were not living, including one shelter with no beds.

It’s fair to wonder what happened to the thousands of ballots that were  mailed to those locations, given Sacramento’s reckless policy of papering the state with ballots –– with no controls on who returns them.

The feds should investigate all this and more. 

And Sacramento should clean up the system: Among other changes, California should send mail-in ballots only to voters who request them; require each voter to submit his/her own ballot; require voter ID; require that all votes are received, not just postmarked, by Election Day; and deliver final vote counts within hours, not weeks.

It’s ludicrous that California counties continue to process ballots for a month after an election.

But the state and local Democrats who benefit from the current system have little incentive to change it.

Federal probes might provide the only relief Californians get from bad actors who manipulate people, elections and government programs to get what they want.