News

Courtesy of www.leedems.org

The October 14th #1 story on Countdown with Keith Olbermann was a report on how Illinois Republicans are assembling a team of volunteers, primarily lawyers trained by Fairfax Electoral Board member Hans von Spakovsky, who have been assigned to “vulnerable” low income precincts in an totally transparent attempt to intimidate minority voters.

Help us defend against electoral fraud in Fairfax by volunteering on Election Day and helping to protect the vote during in-person absentee voting.

On Thursday, October 14th Hans A. von Spakovsky, Vice-Chairman of the Fairfax County Electoral Board held a training session for young Republicans in Chicago (speaking to the conservative Federalist Society there, “Voter Fraud & the Election: What Role Could it Play in November?”). Hans von Spakovsky, Fairfax Electoral Board member, is not a household name. Few Republican operatives who work behind the scenes to suppress the vote are. But many of you may have heard of him when President Bush tried to appoint him to the FEC.

Well, Hans von Spakovsky is back (bio at Politico.com).

The October 14th #1 story on Countdown with Keith Olbermann was a report on how Illinois Republicans are assembling a team of volunteers, primarily lawyers (trained by Fairfax Electoral
Board member Hans von Spakovsky), who have been assigned to “vulnerable” low income precincts in an totally transparent attempt to intimidate minority voters.

On October 6th Illinois GOP Senate candidate Mark Kirk was secretly taped telling supporters about his plan to send teams of lawyers to African-American neighborhoods as “voter integrity” squads on Election Day. In the tape, Kirk says that lawyers will be “deployed” to “vulnerable districts” within the state. The “vulnerable districts” Kirk mentioned just happened to be areas dominated by the African-American demographic, such as the “South and West sides of Chicago, Rockford, Metro East, where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat.” The Kirk campaign confirmed that it was their candidate heard on the audio tape.

The extremely well-documented page about Fairfax Electoral Board member Hans von Spakovsky at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law is more than a little scary reading about just how long and with what intensity Spakovsky has been a key architect of such voter suppression efforts.

The actual current effort to suppress voting is through what is called voter caging.

Voter caging is the practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that is returned undelivered, and using that list to purge or challenge voters registrations on the grounds that the voters on the list do not legally reside at their registered addresses. Supporters of voter caging defend the practice as a means of preventing votes cast by ineligible voters. Voter caging, however, is notoriously unreliable. If it is treated (unjustifiably) as the sole basis for determining that a voter is ineligible or does not live at the address at which he or she registered, it can lead to the unwarranted purge or challenge of eligible voters. …Moreover, the practice has often been targeted at minority voters, making the effects even more pernicious. [Brennan Center, “A Guide to Voter Caging,” 6/29/07]

A coordinated plot by the Republican Party of Wisconsin, Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin and organizations in the so-called Tea Party movement targeting minority voters and college students in “voter caging” effort for voter suppression has been uncovered in evidence obtained by One Wisconsin Now, a statewide advocacy organization in Madison, Wisconsin. Listen to the video below or click here.

In a September 8th article in The Foundry (blog of the The Heritage Foundation), “There Really Is Something Rotten in the Justice Department”, Fairfax Electoral Board member Spakovsky writes:

“The Washington Times lead editorial yesterday was about the Justice Department enabling voter fraud — just in time for the November elections. This is due to the Department’s refusal to enforce the part of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls — people who have died or moved away, and felons who have not yet had their voting rights restored. The longer such names remain on a registration list, the greater the chances that a fraudulent vote will be cast in their names.”