1 Boring Old Man

For several years, I’ve pondered how the Republican machine worked, what turned the wheels that allowed Rovites to have so much influence over the voting apparatus? It hasn’t been a question of if it happening, it’s been a question of how. We’ve learned a lot about that in the last six months. With the U.S. Attorney Firings, we’ve learned about, Kyle Sampson, Monica Goodling, Sara Taylor, Harriet Miers, Michael Elston, to mention just a few in the DoJ [which stands for the Department of Justice?]. Then we learned about Mark "Thor" Hearne, a private operative with the National Republican Lawyers Association, and his bogus American Center for Voting Rights, a veteran of the Florida "hanging chad" debacle. Then recently, we’ve been treated to the likes of Bradley Schlozman, who came from the Civil Rights Division [another modern misnomer]. He seemed more like someone who came out from under a rock somewhere.

Well, tomorrow we have a real treat in store for us – Hans Von Spakovsky. He’s up for a position on the Federal Elections Commission. He may be ground zero in the voter fraud conspiracy. There’s a blistering letter about him from career voting rights attorneys to Dianne Feinstein – blistering. Here’s a sample:

Here’s what TPM-Muckraker has to say:

… von Spakovsky was "the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights." Von Spakovsky reported to Schlozman, and the two worked together to purge voters from the rolls, ensure that voter ID laws were approved with no fuss, and punish lawyers who did not toe the line.

But while Schlozman was the enforcer, von Spakovsky seems to have been the brains of the operation. Von Spakovsky, unlike Schlozman, had a background in election law and had been pushing the voter fraud canard for years — to great effect.

…

Not surprisingly, von Spakovsky delivered once at the Justice Department. As the former voting section attorneys argue in their letter, von Spakovsky attempted to force widespread purging of voter rolls based on a very restrictive reading of election law (which von Spakovsky knew inside and out, since he helped draft the Help America Vote Act). "For example," the lawyers write, "in one letter, he advocated for a policy keeping eligible citizens off the voter rolls for typos and other mistakes by election officials." And as McClatchy detailed last month, he extended his activities to making sure the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that serves as the government’s election information clearinghouse, published research that conformed to the voter-fraud orthodoxy. He was a busy man.

Where in the hell do they find this kind of operative? Oh Lord, he’s from Georgia! Atlanta!