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 former manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an advocate for stricter voting laws. He has been described as playing an influential role in making concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party.
He was nominated to the FEC by President George W. Bush on December 15, 2005, and 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. Opposition to his 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 While von Spakovsky and the Bush Administration denied the accusations of partisanship, the nomination was withdrawn on May 15, 2008.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 Trump named him as a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which disbanded after six months amid controversy. Spakovsky wrote the Project 2025 section on federal election oversight.
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Early life and education
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 Anatol von Spakovsky, a White émigré who had settled in Yugoslavia after World War I and then fled to Germany after World War II, staying in a German displaced persons camp in Bavaria. Von Spakovsky graduated from Virgil I. Grissom High School in 1977, received a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, and a J.D. degree from the Vanderbilt University Law School in 1984. Von Spakovsky is a member of the Georgia and Tennessee bars.
Career
Before entering politics, he worked as a government affairs consultant, in a corporate legal department, and in private practice. 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.
In 2023, von Spakovsky authored the chapter on the Federal Election Commission for the ninth edition of the Heritage Foundation's book Mandate for Leadership, which provides the policy agenda for Project 2025.
Controversies
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 by early 2018.
Von Spakovsky was hired to the U.S. Department of Justice as an expert on elections. 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.
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 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.
Political positions
Climate change
Von Spakovsky rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, calling climate change "a contentious and unproven scientific theory."
Immigration
Von Spakovsky praised the Supreme Court's decision to partially allow President Trump's executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries to go into effect pending Supreme Court review of the case. Von Spakovsky termed the decision a big victory for the administration. According to The Washington Post, von Spakovsky's support for the travel ban "appeared to be a departure from von Spakovsky's earlier beliefs that America has a role in the world to accept refugees, like his parents."
Von Spakovsky has said that sanctuary policies contribute to crime.
Von Spakovsky said in July 2015 that the Obama administration 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."