© Jack Cashill

WND.com - October 14, 2010

or the last two months the Kansas City media have scrupulously ignored an outrageous exercise in election fraud.

Now, the local media are all over the case, and the reason why is all too predictable. The newly accused practice the wrong faith and belong to the wrong ethnic group.

In the way of background, machine Democrat J.J. Rizzo managed to beat (very) conservative Democrat Will Royster by one vote in a Missouri State House primary on August 3.

There was no Republican running in this heavily Democratic, multi-ethnic, Kansas City district. The Democratic nominee faces only a seriously outgunned Libertarian in the November election.

What the Democratic machine and the Kansas CityStar, which endorsed Rizzo, did not count on was for the intrepid Royster to challenge the election in court.

In so doing, Royster and his citizen investigators have unearthed any number of the tricks—old, new, borrowed, and blue--that machine Democrats use to steal elections.

The new wrinkle in election theft is one that the media have skirted like a bad case of head lice. It involves Somalis. They are protected here as zealously as the Alabama media once protected white Baptists and for the same two reasons—race and religion.

At the trial in Jackson County, Missouri Circuit Court a month ago, the extent of the Somali fraud was made so transparent that even the willfully blind could see.

As the testimony revealed, nearly 5 percent of the voters in the election, about 60 in all, were Somalis. According to several election judges, the great majority of them could not speak enough English to ask where the bathroom was.

One wonders how these registered voters could have read and answered in English questions on the citizenship test like “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence” or  “What are the first 10 Amendments called?”  

Just as troubling, “interpreters,” some holding “Rizzo” signs, instructed the Somalis how to vote and, in numerous cases, actually filled out the ballots for them. In the process, they violated more federal laws than Bernie Madoff.

These revelations troubled the local media not a whit. Although a Star reporter sat through the Roister-Rizzo trial, the word “Somali” has yet to make it into print in the Star.

Undeterred by the indifference of the mainstream media and the outright hostility of at least one prominent liberal blog—today’s headline: “Expect Losing Royster Campaign to Reveal More Nonsense”—the Royster people have kept plugging.

What they discovered is that three Rizzo relatives, who clearly live well outside the district, came back to the district to vote. One imagines that they voted for their kin. With a one vote margin, that obviously matters.

Like Rizzo, the relatives are of Italian descent. In Kansas City as elsewhere, Italians, unlike Hispanics and Somalis, are fair game. When they do something wrong, the media get no diversity awards for ignoring it.

Within hours of the Royster press release announcing the discovery, all four TV stations were petitioning for interviews.

Within 24 hours, ace Star columnist Barbara Shelley was demanding “a prompt and thorough investigation.”

In an impressive bit of self-parody, Shelley writes dismissively of the previous allegations that the “relentless” Royster had “rolled out” in his effort to expose the fraud that cost him the election.

She, like her media colleagues, trivializes the fact that sixty or so non-citizen Somalis somehow registered to vote and were illegally assisted when voting. But the allegation that three Rizzo kin voted illegally was “too serious to be left hanging.”

Yes, that allegation is serious. If the Democrats are enabling old school vote fraud in Northeast Kansas City, they are surely doing the same in every big city in America with people of all ethnicities.

Only the one-vote margin and the relentless Royster effort led to the busting of the Rizzo relatives. I am sure they never expected to be caught.

Where Shelly goes comically astray, however, is in suggesting that this allegation is more serious than the criminal exploitation of a struggling ethnic group new to America. The greater part of the Somali voters likely have no idea that what they did could land them in federal prison.

The Democrats who orchestrated their votes surely did, but they obviously didn’t care about the Somalis in Kansas City any more than they care about Hispanics in California or Haitians in Florida.

The media did not care much either. Like the Dems, they know where those votes are going in November.