The Vote Fraud Fraud, Pt. IV: Hans A. von Spakovsky

The great Dahlia Lithwick explains why Democrats should not vote for Hans von Spakovsky, just as he would prefer that they not vote for anything else:

Von Spakovsky currently sits on the FEC as a result of a recess appointment made by President Bush in January of 2006. Before that he served as counsel to the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at Justice. Von Spakovsky’s Senate confirmation hearing last June was noteworthy for many oddities, not the least of which was a letter sent to the rules committee by six former career professionals in the voting rights section of the Justice Department; folks who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations for a period that spanned 36 years. The letter urged the committee to reject von Spakovsky on the grounds that while at DoJ, he was one of the architects of a transformation in the voting rights section from its “historic mission to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section.” The authors named him as the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”

“If von Spakovsky is confirmed,” Lithwick notes, “it will be yet more evidence that Democrats have no more regard for the rule of law, or the integrity of the Justice Department, than Karl Rove does.” Indeed.

I should also say, since some commenters in various discussions seem to miss this distinction, that there’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring Voter ID to vote. If IDs were provided by the state, made easy to obtain, and part of a general policy was to maximize voter turnout, an ID requirement would be fine. But many actual Voter ID laws — which are advanced by people who don’t favor measures to increase voting, are supported by people who have no problem with much more susceptible to fraud but GOP-skewing absentee voting, and are not supported by any actual evidence that people voting under other names is a remotely significant problem — are simply a pretext for suppressing Democratic turnout and should be rejected.

…Christy has a good roundup here.