Mommy, the ACORN Guy is Peeing in the Street

by Jack Cashill

For me, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign came on Halloween night. I was mindlessly watching TV and passing out Halloween candy when my neighbor and her three little ones, two football players and a cheerleader, came breathlessly to the door of my Brookside home.

“Did you see the ACORN guy,” the mom said alarmed. “He is peeing in the street.”

I had not yet seen this fellow, but I had met two of his colleagues in the days previous. The radical community activist group ACORN—Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—had dumped them and scores of other “paid volunteers” in our midst to drum up new voter registrants. 

These volunteers had made local news when it was revealed that, to meet their daily quotas, they were not limiting the pool of new voters to the living. True to form, while ACORN workers were exhuming new voters, major media folks were burying the story. They all had an election to win.

As to specifics, Election Board officials in St. Louis had discovered roughly 1,500 “potentially fraudulent” voter registration cards, including at least three from the deceased, and this just a few weeks before the election.  The primary culprit in St. Louis was ACORN. Meanwhile, in Kansas City four ACORN employees were indicted for voter registration fraud.

None of this surprised me. What did surprise me, however, was that my ACORN guys were recruiting only those folks, living or dead, who would vote “Yes” on Missouri’s Amendment Two. As Missouri readers know, Amendment Two was drafted to give researchers in Missouri a constitutional right to engage in embryonic stem cell research.

I read ACORN’s Web site from end to end, and found absolutely nothing in their mission about stem cell or any other kind of medical research. In my neighborhood, given the near perfect correlation between “Yes on 2” and “McCaskill” signs, I pre-sumed that this was a subtle way of recruiting Claire McCaskill voters. 

On the St. Louis side, ACORN volunteers had been reported scaring up likely voters for McCaskill, a Bozo no-no for not-for-profits, and had been busted for doing so. I presumed the “Yes on 2” tactic to be a more subtle ploy for accomplishing the same. Say what you will about Amendment 2, I refuse to believe that the good citizens in the “Yes” camp would have contracted with guys who pee in streets to promote their cause.

When I tried to find out what motivated these volunteers, however, I met with little success. The first ACORN guy I met was incapable of talking to anyone. He had been sitting uninvited on people’s porches for the past few hours scaring the neighbor children. When I tried to talk to him, he told me he thought he was on Chestnut Street, two miles to the east. I honestly thought this guy had Alzheimer’s, so I called 911 on his behalf in the hope that some kindly police officer would escort him to a better place. To his credit, he did not pee on me or in the street.

The second ACORN guy I met was at least semi-coherent.  He also did not pee in the street. So was the third ACORN guy, the one who did pee in the street. I asked them both why ACORN was supporting Amendment 2. Although they were amiable enough, neither of them had a clue. Both were clearly zoned out in any case, almost assuredly on drugs, as they and their pals wandered Zombie-like throughout Missouri, likely scoring some serious candy in the run-up to Halloween.

Ironically, of course, the people who finance ACORN’s mischief, international brigand George Soros comes to mind, are the same ones who screamed loudest about the outcome of the election in Florida in November 2000. In Missouri, these are the same people who howled when the state legislature passed a law—“muscled the measure through,” according to The Star—requiring the showing of a photo I.D. before people could vote. 

Although the acquisition of a picture I.D. would have been free under Missouri law, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled the measure unconstitutional. The good judges argued that it might cost money to gather the documents necessary to qualify for a picture I.D., not as much money, say, as for a fifth of Johnny Walker Red, but money nonetheless. At this news, the voting dead and their supporters breathed a sigh of relief. They might not be able to fly on airliners or cash a check, but they could sure as hell vote.

By and large Kansas City media shared their glee. In a clever little sleight of hand, they encouraged African Americans to believe that a measure designed largely to keep illegal immigrants from voting was a throwback to the days of Bull Connor and poll taxes, passed for no nobler reason than to take away their civil rights. Given the closed loop of bad info on which they suckle, some of them, maybe most, actually believed what they were saying. This included my celebrity co-panelists on KCPT’s Kansas City Week in Review, none of whom, to their credit, peed in the streets or on the set.

Historically, the media have not taken vote fraud seriously for one principle reason: their ideological allies are the ones stealing the votes. They have been for the last century. If illegal immigrants were coming from Cuba and voting Republican, you can bet that your next roofing job that the media would have a whole different take on photo IDs. Hell’s bells, the ones I know would be joining the mother-loving Minutemen and treating every undocumented schlep as if he were Elian.

To be fair, fraud in Missouri is not as bad as it once was. In 1934, for instance, Tom Pendergast’s gangster pals murdered four people in a hotly—to say the least—contested Kansas City election. In the next few years alone, 259 Pendergast cronies would be found guilty of vote fraud.

In the years since, the mischief has become less overt here in Missouri, but it has obviously not gone away. As I have noted in these pages before, I moderated a primary debate for Jackson County Prosecutor at an inner-city church a few years back and watched in astonishment as audience members regaled the candidates with instance after instance of vote fraud by a certain political club. Unfortunately for the citizens, both of the world-be prosecutors had eagerly sought the club’s endorsement and weren’t overly squeamish about how it harvested votes.

The thinking among respectable people is that it is impolite at best to talk about vote fraud in the minority community. The implication is that minorities are the beneficiaries of the fraud. In fact, however, they are the principal victims. National groups like ACORN and local groups like Freedom Inc., by means fair and foul, can kill a would-be reformer’s career before he or she gets elected to the school board. Then too, in those parts of the nation where illegal immigrants vote in numbers, they are not voting for African Americans.

Left to me, I’d make voting as tough as getting on an airplane, tougher even. Terrorists can only hijack a plane. Fraudulent voters can hijack a nation.

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.