Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced Friday that a Compton city councilmember and five others have been charged with felony election fraud in connection with a June 2021 local race.
City Councilmember Isaac Galvan, 34, was arraigned on Friday along with Jace Dawson, who prosecutors alleged was his main co-conspirator in the plot to steal the seat for Compton's District 2.
The charges against Dawson paint a picture of an interloper to the L.A. political scene who allegedly leveraged a fabricated life story in pursuit of government positions.
Dawson, also 34, has been accused by the D.A. of directing four individuals to vote illegally in Galvan’s reelection race against challenger Andre Spicer. None of the named individuals were residents of Compton when they voted. Residency in Compton is a legal requirement for participating in city elections.
Dawson’s alleged rigging may have had a critical impact on the race, as Galvan was reelected by only one vote. The criminal complaint filed by Gascón’s office alleged that Dawson ultimately received an appointment to a city liaison position, possibly in exchange for gathering votes for Galvan.
Dawson, whose legal name is reportedly Jonathan Dawson, was himself a candidate in the April 2021 primary for the District 2 seat. After announcing his own candidacy against incumbent Galvan, questions arose around certain biographical claims Dawson has made in multiple pursuits for political office in L.A. County.
Dawson’s alleged record of stretching the truth has become somewhat of an open secret in local political circles. He sought an endorsement from the Stonewall Democratic Club, a premiere political organization for the LGBTQ community in L.A., for his 2021 run at Compton City Council. Stonewall granted that endorsement but publicly withdrew it shortly thereafter following an investigation into claims Dawson made on his endorsement application.
A spokesperson told KNX that club leaders gave Dawson the opportunity to rebut an allegation that he submitted falsified educational and work records to the endorsement committee. Dawson declined to provide evidence to support the claims on his application, and the club voted unanimously to withdraw its endorsement.
The LGBTQ Victory Fund, a national organization that supports LGBTQ political candidates, withdrew their endorsement of Dawson on similar grounds.
If elected to Compton City Council, Dawson would have been one of five individuals with the power to approve city contracts and enact wide-reaching ordinances, such as the raising or lowering of sales taxes and granting of business licenses.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and Clerk’s office, which administers local elections, did not comment on whether the agency employs any verification processes to fact-check candidates’ biographical claims.
A man of many addresses
In a candidate statement published in a county voter guide distributed for the April 2021 Compton City Council primary, Dawson wrote he had been living in the city for seven years.
That claim sent Jasmyne Cannick’s antennae up. Cannick is a political strategist who has worked for three Compton mayoral administrations. She tends to know, at least by name recognition, the political movers and shakers around the city.
Before 2021, Cannick had never heard of Dawson—the loquacious, young, upstart candidate with a splashy resume that purported he graduated from high school at the age of 14, earned a Ph.D., was ordained as a youth minister and campaigned for the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
After some digging, Cannick discovered Dawson had run for a city council seat in Los Angeles just one year prior. Residency in the City of Los Angeles is required of all candidates for council. Either Dawson’s claim of residing in Compton for the last seven years was untrue, or he misrepresented his residency to L.A. city election officials in 2019.
“He’s not from Compton. He had a legal address in Los Angeles and was living with someone in Hawthorne, I think,” Cannick told KNX. Cannick said she believes Dawson rented an apartment in Compton on or around the 60-day residency cut-off required of candidates for city office.
Cannick believes Dawson is a carpetbagger, seeking office in Compton after he failed to obtain enough signatures to appear on the L.A. city ballot in 2019.
Comptonians were not the only ones receiving conflicting information about Dawson’s residency. Dawson has represented himself as an at-large member of the West Adams Neighborhood Council, a volunteer advisory body working out of the South Los Angeles neighborhood. He is indeed listed on the Council's website as an at-large representative. In an email to KNX, West Adams Neighborhood Council president Steven Meeks confirmed that Dawson “is a resident in our WANC boundary area,” according to their records.
Questionable academic qualifications
Dawson has told a similarly disjointed story about his educational background. He has claimed at various times to hold a bachelor’s degree in communications from two different undergraduate programs; master’s degrees in mental health studies, communications, public health, counseling, sociology and community development; and a doctorate in human behavioral studies from two different institutions.
Dawson removed his LinkedIn profile after Fox 11 conducted an investigation into his background in March 2021. But screenshots of that profile taken before its deletion indicate that at least one of the degrees Dawson claimed to have completed was conferred by New Charter University, a for-profit institution based in Salt Lake City that has since rebranded as Bottega University. New Charter was previously known as Andrew Jackson University and has weathered accusations of being a diploma mill.
According to a version of Dawson’s resume uploaded to the hiring website Indeed.com and last updated on April 22, 2021, his doctorate in “mental health human behavior studies” at the College of Metaphysical Studies was ongoing from 2019. The resume listed the school as located in San Bernardino, however, a spokesperson told KNX it is in fact located in Bakersfield.
She told KNX the college has never conferred a doctorate on Jace Dawson. He received a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies there roughly five months ago but failed to deliver a required course-of-study proposal to finalize his enrollment. The College of Metaphysical Studies is chiefly a divinity school and offers no programs in mental health or human behavior studies.
A profile of Dawson published by Voyage L.A. magazine refers to him as “Dr. Jace,” suggesting his Ph.D. was already completed in Jan. 2021.
Elsewhere, Dawson claimed to have pursued “doctoral studies” at Midwestern University, which has campuses in Illinois and Arizona. There is no record of Dawson having resided in either state. A spokesperson for Midwestern University told KNX they have no record of anyone named Jace Dawson or Jonathan Dawson enrolled at the school, nor does the university offer any Ph.D. programs.
Dawson’s resume also listed a master’s degree in mental health counseling from the College of New Rochelle in Westchester County, New York, completed in 2012. The College of New Rochelle declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in 2019. KNX was unable to verify Dawson’s completion of a degree there.
Jasmyne Cannick was puzzled by allegations that Dawson may have fabricated his educational background in pursuing political office. Today, Compton voters are less impressed by academic credentials than they are by passion and real world experience, she said. “That’s how it was in the olden days,” she told KNX, “that you had to have all these degrees to run for office. That’s not how it is now.”
A political name-dropper with little verifiable experience
But Dawson may have exaggerated his life experience to the same degree as his allegedly inflated academic achievements.
Work experience detailed in Dawson’s resume goes back to 2010. Until 2014, he worked as a district human resource manager with a Bally Total Fitness gym in New York City. From 2016 to 2018, he was employed as director of programs for an unspecified L.A. nonprofit called The Wall. KNX was unable to identify any web presence for an L.A. nonprofit of that name; nor is there any entry for an L.A. entity with that name recorded by the IRS’s nonprofit database. As of 2018, he is listed as working as a senior human resource manager with the corporate catering service EAT Club.
Prior versions of Dawson’s resume recorded by the public records platform Radaris indicate that he worked as a store manager for a Kmart in New York City from 2006 to 2009, a store manager for a Dollar Tree in New York City from 2009 to 2011 and a manager overseeing HR operations for a Duane Reade drug store, also in New York City, from 2011 to 2014.
Neither resume lists any prior political work, which directly contradicts what Dawson has said in interviews with the press.
In a video-recorded interview with the public affairs web show The Compton Chronicles, uploaded in March 2021, Dawson claimed he worked for U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres of New York when Torres was a member of the New York City Council. Dawson said he worked for Torres during the former councilmember’s “first two years” serving on the body. Torres served on the New York City Council from 2014 to 2020; Dawson claimed in that same interview to have moved across the country, to Compton, in 2014.
In the Compton Chronicles video, Dawson also claimed to have worked for U.S. Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Al Green of Texas. He said he worked in Jackson Lee’s office for three years. A spokesperson for the congresswoman’s office could not verify Dawson’s employment there. KNX reached out to Rep. Green’s office for comment and will update this story with more information as it is received.
Other politicians Dawson claimed to have worked for include Texas state senator Rodney Ellis and U.S. Representative Mickey Leland, also of Texas. Leland famously died in a plane crash during a mission trip to Ethiopia in 1989. Dawson was born in 1987 and was about two years old when Leland died.
Dawson also claimed in that same video to have worked for Mayor Lee P. Brown of Houston. Mayor Brown served in office from 1998 to 2004. Dawson would have been 11 years old when Brown entered office and 17 when he left.
The most notable chapters in Dawson’s professed political pedigree entail work he said he did for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in California. With regards to former President Obama’s election and reelection campaigns, in 2008 and 2012 respectively, by his own admission and according to public records, Dawson was living in New York City at the time.
Yet Dawson name-dropped Obama in his 2021 candidate statement, claiming to have worked in for the former president in an unspecified capacity.
On Facebook and on LinkedIn, Dawson has also claimed to have worked for Fox News and the cable TV channel Bravo. Fox 11 confirmed in their investigation of Dawson that there was no record of his employment with Fox.
A possible fraud on the government
Any conscious misrepresentations Dawson made in submitting his candidate statement to L.A. County ahead of his 2021 Compton City Council run, such as a false claim of employment in the Obama White House, may land the talkative young politico in further trouble than he is already facing.
Any candidate who knowingly makes a false statement of material fact in a candidate statement pursuant to California’s Election Code, governed by sections 13307 or 11327, may incur a fine up to $1,000.
KNX has reached out to Dawson for comment on these allegations and at the time of publication has received no reply.
Ultimately, Dawson is accused of election fraud, but his alleged attempts to ingratiate his way into the Democratic political scene in L.A. point to serious weaknesses in the county’s safeguards against deception at the ballot box.
Dawson and Galvan have both pleaded not guilty to charges of felony election fraud in connection with the June 2021 runoff. Both are scheduled to return to court on Sept. 17.