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.'' The email was forwarded to
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions by an aide. 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". Subsequently, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Georgia's voter ID requirement in 2009. Also see: During von Spakovsky's tenure, more than half of the career Justice Department staff left the voting section in protest. Von Spakovsky argued against the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, but the re-authorization overwhelmingly passed Congress and was signed into law by the Bush Administration. A group of career Justice Department staff wrote a letter to the Senate arguing against von Spakovsky's appointment, saying that he "played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and into the hiring process, and included repeated efforts to intimidate career staff." In response to questioning from the Senate, von Spakovsky repeatedly asserted that he could not remember or recall his involvement in various controversial Justice Department decisions, drawing comparisons to the testimony of former
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Faced with mounting opposition, von Spakovsky ultimately withdrew from the FEC confirmation process. However, von Spakovsky's statistics have been labeled "fraudulent" by the
Hennepin County Attorney who investigated the matter.
Claims about voter fraud According to
The New Yorker, von Spakovsky has promoted "the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections". and whom he neglects to identify as the co-author of a book they jointly wrote. He describes the efforts of Kansas Secretary of State
Kris Kobach, his colleague both at the
Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and Heritage, to expose the alleged existence of extensive voter fraud, as "carefully described research," although Kobach's claims have also been shown to be vastly overstated. In a court decision,
Fish v. Kobach, US District Court Judge
Julie A. Robinson ruled that von Spakovsky's claims of widespread voter fraud were not in fact found to be backed up with provable researched cases. Judge Robinson wrote that she gave his testimony little weight because it was "premised on several misleading and unsupported examples of non-citizen voter registration, mostly outside the State of Kansas." She also noted that during the proceedings, Mr. von Spakovsky "could not identify any expert on the subject of non-citizen voter registration." When he tried to use a list of 30 people provided by a Kansas election official as proof of voter fraud in one county, Judge Robinson wrote in her decision: "He later admitted during cross-examination that he had no personal knowledge as to whether or not any of these individuals had in fact falsely asserted U.S. citizenship when they became registered to vote and he did not examine the facts of these individual cases." Judge Robinson found witnesses for the defense were often found to be not credible, finding: "Defendant's expert Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, 'a think tank whose mission [is to] formulate and promote conservative public policies'." Von Spakovsky "...cited a U.S. GAO study for the proposition that the GAO 'found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration roles over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens'." However, on cross-examination, he admitted that the GAO study contained information on a total of eight district courts; half reported that not one non-citizen had been called for jury duty. The three remaining district courts reported that less than 1% of those called for jury duty from voter rolls were noncitizens. Therefore, his report misleadingly described the single district court with the highest percentage of people reporting that they were noncitizens, while omitting mention of the seven other courts described in the GAO report, including four that had zero incidents of noncitizens on voting rolls. Robinson said, "While von Spakovsky's lack of academic background is not fatal to his credibility ...., his clear agenda and misleading statements ... render his opinions unpersuasive." According to
Richard Hasen, an election law expert and professor at
University of California, Irvine, "there are a number of people who have been active in promoting false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud and using that as a pretext to argue for stricter voting and registration rules. And von Spakovsky's at the top of the list." Hasen said that von Spakovsky's appointment to Donald Trump's Commission on Election Integrity was "a big middle finger" from Trump to people "serious about fixing problems with our elections." ==Political positions==