Efforts to Stop Voter Fraud May Have Curbed Legitimate Voting
Paul Van Ness, with material from the McClatchy Newspapers and the Sacramento Bee

Congressional committees looking into the firing of nine U. S. attorneys are investigating more than a dozen present and former Justice Department officials over the alleged misuse of the Department of Justice for the benefit of the Republican Party.

One such case concerns Hans von Spakovsky, a Justice Department civil rights lawyer. McClatchy Newspapers reports that von Spakovsky:,

• sped approval of tougher voter ID laws in Georgia and Arizona in 2005, joining decisions to override career lawyers who believed that Georgia’s law would restrict voting by poor Blacks (a largely Democratic constituency) who might well lack the requisite ID. The lawyers felt that more analysis was needed on the Arizona law’s impact on native Americans and Latinos.
• allegedly engineered the ouster of Paul DiGregorio, the Chairman of the Federal Elections Commission, whom von Spakovsky considered to be insufficiently partisan (i. e. insufficiently pro Republican).

Another example is Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta, who intervened in a case before U. S. District Judge Susan Dlott of Cincinnati. Democrats alleged that Republicans sent a mass mailing of registered mail to the addresses of mostly Democratic leaning minorities in Ohio. The Democrats point out that when the mail was returned as undeliverable because the voter could not be reached at their registered address, the registration is counted as fraudulent. Republican poll watchers would then challenge these voters when they showed up at the polling place.

This device for suppressing the vote is called voter caging. Republicans have also used it in other states, like Florida and Nevada. Democrats charge that the mass mailing in Ohio targeted registrations on the basis of the race of the voter, in violation of the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Attorney General Acosta sent a letter to Judge Dlott to influence her to rule for the Republican Party by arguing that it would undermine the enforcement of election laws if citizens could not challenge voters’ credentials.

It is highly unusual (and perhaps unethical) for a Justice Department official to intervene in a trial. Former Justice Department civil rights officials charge that Acosta’s letter sided with Republicans engaging in an illegal, racially motivated tactic in a state that would be pivotal in delivering the White House to George Bush in 2004. One former JD official said that the letter amounted to “cheerleading for the Republican defendants.”

 

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