More News on the Politicization of Voting Rights

by Jonah Goldman

The politicization of voting rights in the Civil Rights Division of the DoJ continues to stay in the news.  On July, 19, 2007, McClatchy Newspapers reported Hans von Spakovsky reversed sworn testimony he gave during the Senate confirmation hearing for his nomination to the Federal Election Commission.  Also, The Palm Beach Post, in a story on July 22^nd, used the one-year anniversary of Former Assistant Attorney General (and von Spakovsky's boss) Alex Acosta's appointment as interim U.S. Attorney in South Florida to highlight his role in allowing partisan politics to shape policy while he ran the Civil Rights Division.

As noted by McClatchy, von Spakovsky gave inaccurate testimony about his involvement in an Arizona Voter ID case:

"During his Senate confirmation hearing last month, von Spakovsky testified that he wouldn't have acted on his own in drafting a letter in April 2005 offering legal guidance to Arizona Secretary of State Janice Brewer on how to apply the state's new, toughest-in-the-nation voter identification law. Von Spakovsky assured senators that he would have acted only after consulting with the Voting Rights Section, characterizing himself as a middleman who didn't make policy..."

"...Joseph Rich, who was the Justice Department's voting rights chief when the letter was drafted, said von Spakovsky never consulted with him about it and that Bradshaw had had virtually no involvement in voting rights matters before signing it. Rich said he'd asked Alex Acosta, who was then the civil rights chief, about the letter and Acosta had replied, ‘What are you talking about? Send me the letter.'"

"In a letter to the committee June 29, von Spakovsky revised his account. ‘As I recall, I may not have consulted with the Section prior to drafting the first letter,' he said."

The Palm Beach Post story noted how Acosta took both active and passive roles in politicizing voting rights while Assistant Attorney General.

In 2004, Acosta inserted himself in a partisan lawsuit in Ohio centered on the contentious Presidential Election by sending a letter to an Ohio federal judge a week before the election:

"A black couple filed the case, Spencer vs. Blackwell. They contended that Ohio's procedure for challenging an individual's right to vote was unconstitutional because it would let outside individuals, and not just poll workers, challenge voter eligibility in black districts..."

"...In his Oct. 29, 2004, letter, Assistant Attorney General Acosta wrote U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott that restricting individuals' ability to challenge a voter's qualifications ‘would undermine the ability of election officials to enforce their own state laws that govern the eligibility for voting.'"

Acosta's actions went against longstanding DoJ policy:

"A career staffer who headed the Voting Section from 1999 to 2005 said the letter to the Ohio judge represented a vigorous political effort by a division that previously worked to avoid even the appearance of political bias."

"‘I was there for 36 years, and I'd never seen anything like it,' Joseph D. Rich said."

Acosta further politicized the Voting Section by giving his subordinate, Hans von Spakovsky, carte blanche:

"As supervisor to von Spakovsky and other political appointees, Acosta was ‘letting the patients run the asylum,' said Jon M. Greenbaum, senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section from 1997 to 2003. ‘Alex is a very politically astute guy who tried to walk the line of being nice to the civil rights groups on a personal level, while at the same time not doing things to protect civil rights and in a lot of cases doing damage.'"