What the U.S. attorneys should investigate

"I've always thought of myself as a Democrat," the young staffer told me. "I grew up in a liberal household, but after this campaign I don't know what to think."

The staffer works for Mark Funkhouser, a maverick wonk who survived a 12-candidate primary to challenge Democratic establishment candidate Alvin Brooks in the March 27 run-off for mayor of Kansas City, Mo.

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The immediate cause of dismay was that someone had just broken into Funkhouser's campaign headquarters, a humble doublewide as offbeat as the candidate himself. "This stuff happens," I told him, "all the time."

What troubled the staffer even more was the unlikey alliance of forces – development lawyers, hardball politicos, unions, "civil rights" groups – attacking his straight-shooting, reform-oriented candidate, often underhandedly.

The staffer still hadn't gotten over the notorious Kelo eminent domain case in which the five most liberal judges on the Supreme Court sided with the development lawyers over the humble property owners of New London, Conn. He had a hard time finding the "liberal" in that decision.

Still, Funkhouser may well prevail on Tuesday. One thing that might stop him, however, is if someone comes up with the money to inspire Kansas City's wholesale vote harvesters in a major way.

Every city has its harvesters. Each election season, through a variety of means fair and foul, they recruit voters lacking the will or the wherewithal to vote on their own.

The Democratic Party has had a near perfect monopoly on urban vote harvesting machinery for at least a century. Without aggressive harvesting in Richard Daley's Chicago and LBJ's Texas, for instance, JFK would never have been president.

Most harvesting is technically legal. In Missouri's November 2006 election, for example, evidence suggests that the pro-embryonic stem cell forces contracted with the radical community activist group ACORN – Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now – to get out the vote for Missouri's Amendment 2.

The paid ACORN workers combed the cities and prodded voters to the polls. Working the skid rows, the nursing homes, the housing projects and other sources where people are easily intimidated or "incentivized," ACORN and other harvesters turned the tide in the election.

By a 64-36 margin, the "no high school" voters decided that therapeutic cloning was in the best interest of science. The "under $15,000 income" voters concurred in this judgment, registering a 63-37 approval.

Thanks to their votes, the Yes on 2 forces eked out a 51 to 49 percent victory statewide, and Democrat Claire McCaskill beat incumbent Republican Jim Talent in the Senate race 49 to 47 percent.

To meet their daily quotas, however, the ACORN workers did not limit the pool of new voters to the living and legal. Election Board officials in St. Louis discovered roughly 1,500 "potentially fraudulent" voter registration cards, including at least three from the deceased, and in Kansas City four ACORN employees were indicted for voter registration fraud.

Harvesters often stray from the straight and narrow, and theirs is the kind of mischief that U.S. attorneys should be investigating. To expect U.S. attorneys to somehow balance the Republican and Democrat fraud scalps on their belt, however, as some Democrats do, is a truly berserk form of affirmative action.

The task falls to the U.S. attorneys because the local prosecutors will rarely do the policing themselves. They depend too much on the harvesting. A few years back, I moderated a Democratic primary debate for Jackson County, Missouri, prosecutor at an inner-city church. As is true in many urban counties, there was no serious Republican opposition.

During the Q&A, audience members flustered the two white candidates by citing one case after another of electoral malarkey by a certain civil rights group turned vote-harvesting machine.

In the inner city, vote harvesting kills reform in its tracks, and the people were there to protest that. Unfortunately for these citizens, however, both of the would-be prosecutors had eagerly sought the machine's endorsement and weren't overly squeamish about how it harvested votes.

In 1994, Nat Helms, then the spokesman for the effort to legalize gambling in Missouri, approached a group of ministers actively associated with this same harvesting machine. They had been preaching that gambling was bad for the community.

Helms, who later publicly regretted his actions, tells what happened next:

"We went to them and said, 'what is it going to take for you to change your message?' Nothing convinced them of anything. So we said, 'what about a million dollars?' Well, that worked. Next week, gambling is good. Gambling is good for Kansas City. They got posters out, they got their ward workers out."

Statewide, Helms and his cronies spent $12 million to register 54,000 voters, all through Democratic organizations and politicians, black and white. "You satisfy the state rules," said Helms, who explained in comic detail the deceptions used to satisfy those rules, "and the money goes to who you want it to go to."

By the way, compared to the murderous harvesting machines of cities like Boston and Philadelphia – and here I recommend Howie Carr's eye-popping "The Brothers Bulger" and Sean Patrick Griffin's courageous "Black Brothers Inc." – vote harvesting in Kansas City is halfway benign.

Kansas City harvesters gave up election-day shenanigans like kidnapping and murder with U.S. Attorney Maurice Milligan's successful prosecution of Harry Truman's mentor, Boss Tom Pendergast.

At the time, then-Sen. Truman bitterly protested Milligan's "Hitler-Stalin tactics." Upon ascending the presidency, one of Truman's first acts was to fire Milligan. When Attorney General Francis Biddle protested, Truman fired him, too.

Just like vote harvesting, this was business as usual for a certain political party.

It still is.

Note: Go to Jack Cashill's website to read more on this issue.