Will Royster challenged a 40th District political dynasty three years ago and got screwed. Now, he won’t let it go
Will Royster thumbs through a pamphlet while patiently waiting for the Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners’ July 25 meeting to begin.
The clock on the wall is frozen at 8:58 in this dark, windowless room in Union Station’s basement. Royster is equally frozen in time. He has waited three years to face the commissioners in this room, which he believes is the scene of one of the biggest election crimes in Missouri’s history.
Commission chairwoman Megan Thornberry scraps the order of the meeting agenda and allows Royster to speak. Dressed in a blazer and a tie and habitually peering at those in the room from above his glasses, Royster says he won’t take more than 15 minutes.
For the next half-hour, Royster repeats complaints about his one-vote loss to John Rizzo in the 2010 Democratic primary for state representative from Missouri’s 40th District. Those grievances, Royster claims, amount to a systemic failure by authorities, such as the election board, to properly investigate that election’s result.
Time hasn’t soothed Royster’s anger. The 50-year-old former Navy pilot, seated awkwardly at the boardroom table facing the commissioners, speaks about the election like a man who wants to remain calm and cordial but can barely restrain his frustration.
Since 2010, Royster has spent $35,000 of his own money in legal fees, first trying to get the election thrown out and later attempting to get its suspicious circumstances investigated.
“We’re not here to retry this. That’s not my point,” Royster says, with his back turned to the election board’s director, Shelley McThomas. “My point is to find truth and ask you to help me do that.”
Royster says he’s here on behalf of 663 Northeast Kansas City voters who were disenfranchised on August 3, 2010. He wants to know why authorities haven’t seemed to care about sworn statements from election judges about improper polling-place electioneering.
Why, Royster wants to know, were 14 ballots lacking judges’ initials allowed to count in the final tally? Why, he asks, did Rizzo get three recounts of the close 2006 election, which he lost to John Burnett, when Royster received only one?
Thornberry cuts Royster off, telling the failed candidate that she’s bothered by his accusations that the commissioners botched the election, especially given that their lawyers aren’t present (even though KCEB attorney David Raymond is seated at the table near her).
“If there are any more accusations of legal wrongdoing, I’m uncomfortable with that,” Thornberry says.
“I understand you feel a little fingered,” Royster says. “I felt like that for three years.”
Royster rails on the election board, the Missouri Secretary of State’s office and the Missouri Attorney General’s office for not intervening in an election that looked suspicious, affirming instead the razor-thin margin and sending Rizzo to Jefferson City.
“Now you’re suggesting a conspiracy was going on?” asks KCEB secretary Melodie Powell.
Royster hasn’t used the word conspiracy, but he wonders why his research shows that votes appeared to have been cast from outside the 40th District and were allowed to count. Or why Jackson County Judge W. Stephen Nixon, who ruled against Royster’s court challenge to the election result, soon after got a job as the Jackson County counselor. (Rizzo’s father, Henry Rizzo, is a Jackson County legislator.)
“We cannot address whether a court committed a conspiracy,” Thornberry says. “That’s not our job.”
Royster winds down his speech to the commissioners, half of whom haven’t spoken. He wants the commissioners to acknowledge that voters cast illegal ballots and that there were other examples of election misconduct. But he won’t get such an admission today.
“We turned this information in. We couldn’t get any help with that,” Royster says. “Nobody seemed to care.”
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Royster walks out of the meeting room. In his hand is a Kansas City Election Board pamphlet that he picked up before the meeting. The brochure extols the virtues of becoming an election worker. In it, Royster has circled the heading in black ink: “Contributing to timely, fair, honest and accurate elections.”
The commissioners say nothing of Royster’s appearance after he leaves and resume their June meeting.
It’s no longer in doubt whether voter fraud occurred in the 40th District 2010 Democratic primary. The only remaining question is how widespread the fraud actually was.
Given that Royster lost by a single vote, it’s reasonable for him to say the election result was swayed by illegal votes cast by Rizzo’s relatives.
On June 28, John and Clara Moretina, Rizzo’s uncle and aunt, pleaded guilty to charges filed by Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker of illegally voting in that year’s 40th District primary. The investigation didn’t reveal whom the Moretinas voted for, but it stands to reason that they supported their nephew.
The Kansas City Police Department was tipped off to that investigation after John Moretina pleaded guilty to federal charges of the same crime a month earlier.
In 2012, the FBI spoke with the Moretinas at their home in Gladstone, where they had been registered voters in Clay County until July 9, 2010, less than a month before the cutoff date to register for the Rizzo-Royster election.
That day, they registered as residents of a Columbus Park duplex at 515 Holmes. The Moretinas later told the FBI that they were living on Holmes temporarily, so that Clara’s daughter could help her care for John.
However, the Moretinas couldn’t prove residency in Columbus Park; they still paid utilities at their Gladstone address, to which they returned soon after the primary election.
The Moretinas paid fines and were barred for life from voting.
Several sources, including the KCEB’s Thornberry, tell The Pitch that authorities continue to look into apparent voting irregularities.
“To our knowledge, those investigations are ongoing,” Thornberry says.
Royster believes that the number of questionable votes may run into the hundreds. The basis for his theory is sworn testimony from election judges, both Democratic and Republican, who reported that a contingent of Somali voters (one of many ethic groups in the 40th District) received assistance and, in some cases, impermissible coaching at polling places.
Lindee Hopkins, a Republican judge who was at the Kansas City Museum that election day, wrote in an affidavit that an unidentified Somali man shepherded a group of Somali women into the polling place, instructed them on how to vote, and told them to vote for Rizzo.
Elaine Oberg, a Democratic judge supervisor at the Garfield Elementary School polling location, testified in Jackson County Circuit Court to similar observations but did not say whether voters were coached to vote for Rizzo.
By law, voters who can’t read or have some other impairment can receive assistance in casting a ballot, but they must submit an affidavit. Their assistants are not allowed to coerce the person they’re guiding into voting one way or another.
Shawn Kieffer, a director for the KCEB, testified in court that no such affidavits had been collected.
However, there is no clear evidence that the Somali voters cast ballots for Rizzo, nor is there evidence that they were unregistered voters.
Some votes cast in the election are suspicious. There was a vote cast in the 40th District by someone whose name matches a Lee’s Summit man who made a contribution to Rizzo’s campaign. It’s not clear whether that vote has been investigated.
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Some suspicions about specific voters raised by the Royster campaign don’t withstand scrutiny — three votes, for instance, appeared to come from 40th District addresses that were actually owned by the Land Trust of Jackson County, a collection of vacant properties that have been taken over by the county and subsequently transferred to the city of Kansas City.
One of those votes in the Rizzo-Royster election came from 122 Oakley Avenue, a house that was condemned in 2009 and left vacant. Kansas City police records show that the voter did indeed live at a different address in the 40th District and voted properly.
Another vote from a Land Trust property came from a couple that had moved from a condemned house at 5010 East Eighth Street to another house within the 40th District.
Kansas City police also investigated claims that a man living in the nearby 41st District somehow managed to vote in the 40th District. Their investigation showed no evidence of improper voting. (The voter had actually moved to the 40th District, even though his registration was still an old address.) It did reveal sloppy record keeping and election management by the Kansas City election board.
Much of that evidence came too late for Royster’s campaign. In 2010, Royster and his lawyers sued in Jackson County Circuit Court and later in an appeals court to have the election nullified. Neither court was persuaded by Royster’s claims of voting irregularities, at least not enough to overturn an election.
But the bulk of Royster’s evidence, such as the Moretinas’ votes, didn’t become public until after those court decisions. Royster says the KCEB didn’t provide him with a list of who voted in the election until shortly before they went to court — not enough time, he says, to build a case.
James B. Nutter Sr., founder of the eponymous mortgage company and a sought-after financier for election campaigns, hasn’t often paid attention to 40th District races.
“They’ve always been behind-the-door when the goodies are passed out,” Nutter tells The Pitch. “A lot of times, the politicians that are in that district, they don’t have a lot of respect for the voter. They promise them things they have no intention of keeping.”
The population in the Northeast is both a transient one and rather diverse demographically, with several racial and ethnic communities living side by side. (Twenty-seven languages are spoken at Northeast High School.) There’s also a gap between the Northeast’s wealthy and destitute residents.
It wasn’t always that way for Kansas City’s Historic Northeast neighborhood. Former City Manager Bob Collins and former Police Chief Rick Easley lived there, giving the area a source of clout within City Hall. In the 1990s, the district benefited from representation in the Missouri General Assembly from Henry Rizzo and Sen. Ronnie DePasco, two men with influence in Jefferson City.
“We don’t get the attention we used to both on a local level but county and state,” says Michael Bushnell, publisher of the Northeast News. “Back in the ’90s, Henry Rizzo and Ronnie DePasco were a Jefferson City powerhouse. And I went a lot of times to Jefferson City to speak to a committee about a bill. … When you’ve got somebody like DePasco who controlled the traffic of a Senate bill and tag-teamed with Henry, those guys were tied to people across the state.
“Community involvement over the years has been falling from the standpoint of elections and stuff like that,” Bushnell continues. “Back when Henry was running and when Henry held that seat, it was usually a 3,500-to-4,500 (vote) race. Now we’re roughly down to 50 percent of that.”
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John Rizzo had twice sought his father’s old seat from John Burnett but lost both elections, in 2006 and 2008. His path to Jefferson City didn’t figure to get any easier with Royster in the race.
While Rizzo appealed to many of the old-guard Northeast residents who had been fans of his father’s work in the Missouri General Assembly, Royster was seen as the favorite among the new residents: the folks who bought old homes in Pendleton Heights and Scarritt-Renaissance with an eye toward fixing them and improving the neighborhood.
Royster’s father, like Rizzo’s, once held the seat representing the Historic Northeast.
Despite Royster’s long history of community and volunteer work, Nutter didn’t know much about Royster when they met before the election.
Royster visited Nutter, as many aspiring local politicians do, in hopes of getting the well-heeled political influencer’s support.
“I liked his appearance and I liked the way he talked,” Nutter says. “He said the right words. He said he wanted to make some improvements for his district.”
For the first time in years, Nutter threw his support behind a 40th District candidate: Royster.
If voter fraud had never been proved, the 2010 40th District primary might have been remembered as unusually acrid for a small neighborhood district.
“It was a terrible campaign,” Royster says. “It was awful. … Rizzo started right off the bat. Everything was negative.”
Many of Rizzo’s ads portrayed Royster as a Republican because he owned a gated property (as if no Democrats lived in opulent houses), and accused him of lying about his service as a COMBAT (Community Backed Anti-Drug Tax) commissioner and of lobbing lawsuits — stemming from an incident with a friend at Kona Grill on the Plaza — against the Kansas City Police Department.
Royster says he wanted to keep his messaging about safety and quality-of-life issues. But he sent out a mailer tying Rizzo to a predatory title-loan business. While technically true, it was one that Royster supporters had hoped wouldn’t go out. They were able to persuade Royster and his campaign workers — Chris Moreno and Adam Schieber — to hold off on sending out more inflammatory pieces.
“Negative campaigns work,” Royster says. “What they do is they ultimately drive down the number of voters that come out to vote … and that’s to Rizzo’s advantage.”
The negativity, while it raised the profile of the race across Kansas City, seemed to wear out the neighborhood.
“It got to the point where it was all about which guy do you hate more; it was hardly even about the issues,” says Bryan Stadler, a community activist in the Northeast and a cartoonist for the Northeast News. “It was about people’s personal feelings about J.J. Rizzo’s family or personal feelings about whether Royster was qualified for the job or not.
“The Rizzo campaign was alleging Royster was not mentally stable enough, criticizing his stress level or ability to solve problems or handling things. They were bringing his divorce into it,” Stadler continues. “Royster was comparing Rizzo to a mobster and lumping him into the family’s payday-loan business and calling him a loan shark.”
The campaign literature was reminiscent of the ugliest congressional campaigns. They’re not the types of ads commonly seen in Statehouse races, particularly in a primary between members of the same party. That may explain why Rizzo ran uncontested in 2012.
“There are a lot of movers and shakers in Pendleton Heights and Scarritt who would be excellent [politicians], but I don’t think they will do it because they have full-time jobs,” says David Remley, a photographer deeply involved in community issues in the Northeast. “And in this day and age, who would want to put themselves through that?”
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Royster turned down another run at office in 2012, in part because of divorce proceedings that started that year and continue today. And the 2010 experience makes him question the sanctity of the voting process.
“My residual questions would be, what’s preventing it from happening again?” Royster says. “That’s a huge investment of time and emotional effort. It’s discouraging. I talked to a few folks who could have run, but all the folks said the same thing: ‘I saw what happened to you, Will. I could never do that.’ “
John Rizzo did not return several calls from The Pitch for this story.
And in most other media, he has remained silent about his relatives ending up with a rap sheet from his election, other than to call it “unfortunate.”
“I’ve been re-elected since then,” Rizzo told The Kansas City Star the day the Moretinas pleaded guilty in Jackson County. “Hopefully, these guilty pleas will end the talk about an election held almost three years ago.”
Star columnist Barbara Shelly acknowledged having to eat crow for accepting at face value Rizzo’s earlier claim that his aunt and uncle lived in the 40th District, an explanation that law enforcement clearly wasn’t buying. (Clara Moretina told The Pitch, “We’re glad it’s behind us,” but she did not want to comment further.)
The Missouri Legislature has also been mostly silent about Rizzo’s controversial position in the House of Representatives. Republicans, a party typically advocating for stronger voter-identification laws, haven’t made much of an example of Rizzo.
Rizzo has even risen to some level of leadership within the Democratic Party in Jefferson City, spending the 2013 session as the minority whip.
One Jackson County political insider tells The Pitch that, despite the Moretinas’ guilty pleas, Rizzo maintains political stature, in part thanks to his affable personality.
State Sen. Jason Holsman tells The Pitch that Rizzo’s election isn’t a matter of debate in Jefferson City.
“It has no bearing on the current makeup of the Legislature,” Holsman says.
Beyond political opportunists Jack Cashill (who for once isn’t peddling a conspiracy theory) and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (who is keen on passing voter-ID legislation), there has been little outrage over a local election in which relatives of a candidate, who won a race by a single vote, were convicted of voter fraud.
“I wish there was interest,” Nutter says. “And I’m not saying there isn’t, but I don’t know of any.”
In the Northeast, residents have moved on, even if Royster hasn’t.
“I am still outraged,” Remley tells The Pitch, “but no, I don’t think there’s a lot of palatable outrage.”
Some say Royster and his supporters’ relentless pushing of the voter-fraud story has made other supporters tired of the 2010 election.
“Will Royster lost a lot of sympathy at the way the election results were handled,” Stadler says. “I get why he and his supporters were disappointed with the result, especially now that it was proven that there were probably enough cases of voter fraud that Royster should have won. He made the election about himself rather than the neighborhood. Once he didn’t get what he wanted, he went home and cried in his room about it. He didn’t show the neighborhood that even though he lost the election, he still cared about the neighborhood.”
Royster says he still cares about the neighborhood but acknowledges that his profile within it has dropped since the election.
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He adds that he has been more withdrawn because of his divorce. But that’s not all.
“I’ve really been disgusted,” Royster says. “I’ve heard a lot of people privately talk about this. I think literally everyone knows what happened, but my disgust is, not one of the people in positions of power have stepped up publicly and called for investigations, and that’s disgusting to me. And frankly, it should be to all voters.”
And Royster isn’t apologetic about loudly calling attention to the voter fraud.
“When nobody was acting, Adam, Chris and I are thinking, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ ” Royster says. “It was just like a trip. We started getting really loud: ‘Hey, everybody, look at what’s going on here.’ I imagine most people didn’t know what was going on. … Your typical person on the street, maybe your typical voters saw, ‘Those guys are just mad because they lost by a vote. They’re just a sore loser.’ Even people who voted for me probably said, ‘Let it go.’ That’s what generally happened. The typical person doesn’t want to hear it. It’s noise to them, and the people who perpetrated it wanted to suppress it.”
Meanwhile, Royster, who considers himself a conservative Democrat, has backed slowly away from the local Democratic Party. He says the party has also backed away from him.
“Absolutely, I was totally abandoned by the local Democrats,” Royster says. “The local Democrats were all afraid of pushback.”
The Rizzo-Royster election is no longer a topic of discussion among local Democrats.
Mike Sanders, who until recently was chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party, would not discuss the issue.
Tom Wyrsch, chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Committee, says the Missouri Court of Appeals’ snuffing out Royster’s last recount attempt ended the issue.
“He [Royster] hasn’t participated since then, and neither has his wife, Carol,” Tom Wyrsch tells The Pitch. “But they would be welcome back. I have no animosity toward them.”
KCEB chairwoman Thornberry tells The Pitch that the commissioners are taking Royster’s allegations seriously.
“We’ve done our own investigation since then [2010] and we’ve continued to investigate,” Thornberry says, adding that the commission has forwarded its information to the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office and the FBI.
Royster isn’t satisfied. He believes the election board screwed up in administering his election and demands that it acknowledge the error.
“If all the demands were met, it would do a few things for me,” Royster says. “It would mean they actually did what they were supposed to do, which is investigate allegations of illegal electioneering and illegal voter fraud. That’s something they’re supposed to investigate. If they do that, I’m not going to pat them on the back. That was something they were supposed to do three years ago.”
