Local Case May Trip Up FEC Nominee

by Jonah Goldman

A St Louis Post-Dispatch article, "Local case may trip up FEC nominee," features the Lawyers' Committee's Jon Greenbaum and Joe Rich detailing some of Hans von Spakovsky's partisan activities during his tenure when he served at the Department of Justice.

"For more than a year, a team of veteran attorneys in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division crafted a lawsuit arguing that Hazelwood School Board elections violated voting-rights laws.

The attorneys had seen a pattern they found disturbing: Only two black candidates had won election to the seven-member board during the past decade, in a district where about 65 percent of the nearly 20,000 students and about 40 percent of the voting population are black.

In early 2004, the staffers made a pitch to their deputy assistant attorney general, arguing that the trend could be stemmed if the school district scrapped its at-large election setup and had candidates run in subdistricts.

Three months later, the officials said, Hans von Spakovsky — counsel to their boss — vetoed the plan, in effect killing the suit.

The Hazelwood case came to light recently as one of many incidents with partisan overtones that have surfaced in the course of von Spakovsky's ongoing nomination to the Federal Election Commission. Congressional Democrats are continuing to look into his past while Republicans say he's been the target of unfair criticism."

Read the entire story here.