Hans von Spakovsky

On February 22, 2017, Von Spakovsky sent an email arguing against the appointment of Democrats and "mainstream Republicans" to the Trump administration's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The email was forwarded to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions by an aide. The release of the email led civil rights leaders to call for Von Spakovsky to step down from the commission and for the commission to be disbanded.

Von Spakovsky said in July 2015 that the Obama administration had released "134,000 (criminal) aliens... in just the past two years." PolitiFact found that the statement was half-true and had several flaws: "About half of von Spakovsky's total, 66,000, involved convicted criminals who had completed their sentences but remained in custody pending deportation. For some large fraction of that group, perhaps as high as 45 percent, it was a court ruling that drove the release, not a decision by the administration. Regarding the other half of von Spakovsky's total, 68,000, it is likely that in most cases ICE decided not to pursue deportation. However, some portion of that group might not have been deportable, and some portion might have continued to serve out a locally imposed sentence and not been released."

In an interview with the New Yorker, von Spakovsky cited two scholars who he said could substantiate that voter-impersonation fraud was a significant threat: Robert Pastor of American University and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. Von Spakovsky said that Pastor had personally experienced voter impersonation, but Pastor refuted von Spakovsky's claim, saying, "I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake. I don't think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem." Both Pastor and Sabato said that they would only support voter ID laws if voter IDs were made free and easily available to all, which is not what Republicans have tried. Sabato, the author of "Dirty Little Secrets," also described voter impersonation as "relatively rare today." In a 2011 article published by the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky again referred to Sabato as an authority to establish the existence of common voter fraud, along with "Stealing Elections," a book by John Fund, whose claims of voter fraud have been extensively debunked, 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.

Von Spakovsky was vice-chairman of the Fairfax County board of elections in 2012.

A portion of the law was subsequently overturned by a federal judge, who compared it to a "Jim-Crow era poll tax". However, the voter ID portion was approved and was in effect in the 2008 election. 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.

Von Spakovsky received his recess appointment by President Bush to the FEC in January 2006. His confirmation hearings were contentious, as Democratic Senators criticized von Spakovsky's Justice Department tenure and accused him of partisanship. 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.

He was nominated to the FEC by President George W. Bush on December 15, 2005, and was appointed by recess appointment on January 4, 2006. However, von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by Senate Democrats, who argued that his oversight of voter laws was unacceptably partisan and that he had consistently acted to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Opposition to the nomination was bolstered by objections from career Justice Department staff, who accused von Spakovsky of politicizing his nominally non-partisan office to an unprecedented degree. While von Spakovsky and the Bush Administration denied the accusations of partisanship, the nomination was withdrawn on May 15, 2008. Von Spakovsky subsequently joined the staff of the Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative think tank. On June 29, 2017, President Donald J. Trump named him to be a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Von Spakovsky also served on the Board of Advisors of the Election Assistance Commission, a government commission created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. He clashed with the commission head, Paul DeGregorio. Several individuals with knowledge of the situation, speaking anonymously to McClatchy Newspapers, alleged that DeGregorio had resisted an overtly partisan agenda and his removal was therefore engineered by von Spakovsky.

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. After Bush's election victory, von Spakovsky was appointed to the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Von Spakovsky has supported his claims about the extent of voter fraud by citing a 2000 investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which purported to find 5400 instances of deceased people in Georgia voting in the last two decades. The Journal-Constitution later revised its findings, noting that it had no evidence of a single deceased person voting and that the vast majority of the instances were due to clerical errors.

Von Spakovsky was hired to the Justice Department as an expert on elections, and he advocated for what he described as the application of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a "race-neutral manner." Von Spakovsky was also tasked with guiding the Bush Administration's role in passing legislation that became known as the Help America Vote Act. Von Spakovsky's tenure at the Justice Department was marked by a focus on voter eligibility and voter fraud. In 2005, he led the department's approval of a controversial Georgia law requiring voters to produce photo ID, 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.

Hans Anatol von Spakovsky (born March 11, 1959) is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He is the manager of the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in Heritage's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an advocate for more restrictive voting laws. He has been described as playing an influential role in making alarmism about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Von Spakovsky was born in Huntsville, Alabama, where his parents had eventually settled after immigrating to the United States in 1951. His German mother met his Russian father Anatoly von Spakovsky, a White émigré who had settled in Yugoslavia after WWI and then fled to Germany after WWII, in a German refugee camp for displaced persons. Von Spakovsky received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 and a J.D. from the Vanderbilt University Law School in 1984. Von Spakovsky is a member of the Georgia and Tennessee bars. Before entering politics, he worked as a government affairs consultant, in a corporate legal department, and in private practice.