Hans Anatol von Spakovsky (born March 11, 1959) is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He is the manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an advocate for more restrictive voting laws. He has been described as playing an influential role in making unfounded concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party.
He was nominated to the FEC by President George W. Bush on December 15, 2005, and was appointed by recess appointment on January 4, 2006. However, von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by Senate Democrats, who argued that his oversight of voter laws was unacceptably partisan. Opposition to the nomination was bolstered by objections from career Justice Department staff, who accused von Spakovsky of politicizing his nominally non-partisan office to an unprecedented degree. While von Spakovsky and the Bush Administration denied the accusations of partisanship, the nomination was withdrawn on May 15, 2008.
Von Spakovsky subsequently joined the staff of The Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative think tank. On June 29, 2017, President Donald Trump named him to be a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
Early life and education
Von Spakovsky was born in Huntsville, Alabama, where his parents had eventually settled after immigrating to the United States in 1951. His German mother met his Russian father Anatoly von Spakovsky, a White émigré who had settled in Yugoslavia after WWI and then fled to Germany after WWII, in a German refugee camp for displaced persons. Von Spakovsky graduated from Grissom High in 1977, received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, and a J.D. from the Vanderbilt University Law School in 1984. Von Spakovsky is a member of the Georgia and Tennessee bars.
Career
Before entering politics, he worked as a government affairs consultant, in a corporate legal department, and in private practice. Von Spakovsky served as Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Georgia, and as a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Registration and Election Board, where he championed strict voter-identification laws.
Von Spakovsky became a member of Voting Integrity Project, which investigated alleged voter fraud across the United States, as well as a member of the politically conservative Federalist Society. He worked as a lawyer for George W. Bush's team during the 2000 Florida Presidential election recount. After Bush's election victory, von Spakovsky was appointed to the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Controversies
Efforts to exclude Democrats and mainstream Republicans from presidential advisory commission On February 22, 2017, Von Spakovsky sent an email arguing against the appointment of Democrats and "mainstream Republicans" to the Trump administration's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The email was forwarded to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions by an aide. The release of the email led civil rights leaders to call for Von Spakovsky to step down from the commission and for the commission to be disbanded.
Justice Department tenure
Von Spakovsky was hired to the U.S. Department of Justice as an expert on elections, and he advocated for what he described as the application of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a "race-neutral manner." Von Spakovsky was also tasked with guiding the Bush Administration's role in passing legislation that became known as the Help America Vote Act. Von Spakovsky's tenure at the Justice Department was marked by a focus on voter eligibility and voter fraud. In 2005, he led the department's approval of a controversial Georgia law requiring voters to produce photo ID, despite strong objections from Justice Department staff that the law would disproportionately harm and disenfranchise African-American voters. Von Spakovsky subsequently acknowledged that he had written a law review article supporting such photo ID laws under the pseudonym "Publius", prompting concerns that he should have recused himself from the Justice Department decision.
A portion of the law was subsequently overturned by a federal judge, who compared it to a "Jim Crow–era poll tax". However, the voter ID portion was approved and was in effect in the 2008 election. Subsequently the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Georgia's voter ID requirement in 2009. Also see: