Voter Suppression Watch: Von Spakovsky Edition
A couple of times over this long beautiful weekend in our nation’s capitol I was tempted to post something to the effect of: I’m just tired of the political hackery of the current administration. It’s time to get back to some very silly posts that reflect my general outlook on life.
Look, I’m a comic. It’s what I do. While I haven’t actually written anything funny in a couple of years, much less do a show about stuff, my nature is to write jokes. I really enjoy writing jokes, and it gives me a great deal of pleasure when people laugh at jokes I’ve written.
On the other hand, Garry Shandling had a very observant comment on Bill Maher’s show two weeks ago. I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close: “I know I’m a comic. But, in my spare time I worry about things.”
Every time I want to go and write something funny I read something that makes me worry.
For instance, I had started to write a sketch called the “WTF News Hour.” The basic premise is that instead of the straight read of the daily news, the co-hosts of the show react like people do on the streets. So, one newscaster reads off the prompter that Israel is bombing Gaza again, and then launches into “WTF is that about anyway? Wouldn’t it be nice to spend Memorial Day watching the old war films without the real-time re-enactment?”
Then, I read this about a character named von Spakovsky:
WASHINGTON - During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.
Writing as “Publius,” von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was “no evidence” that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.
Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.
“Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration’s pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote,” charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.
Here, I’m not focusing on the anonymous article so much, though that’s not so terrific either. What I’m focusing on is his role in voter suppression. What the McClatchy article didn’t mention is von Spakovky’s role in the 2000 election:
In 1997, von Spakovsky wrote an article for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group, that called for an aggressive campaign to ‘purge’ the election rolls of felons. Within months of that article’s publication, the V.I.P. helped put von Spakovsky’s idea into action. Phillips met with the company that designed the process for the removal of alleged felons from the voting rolls in Florida, a process that led, notoriously, to the mistaken disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, most of them Democratic, before the 2000 election,” Toobin wrote. “During the thirty-six-day recount in Florida, von Spakovsky worked there as a volunteer for the Bush campaign. After the Inauguration, he was hired as an attorney in the Voting Section and was soon promoted to be counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, in what is known as the ‘front office’ of the Civil Rights Division.
I’m just saying. These are the people that keep me worried.
