Hans von Spakovsky is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on elections and election reform. He is manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in Heritage’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
He is the co-author with John Fund of the book “Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk” (Encounter Books, 2012).
Before joining Heritage in 2008, Mr. von Spakovsky served two years as a member of the Federal Election Commission, the authority charged with enforcing campaign finance laws for congressional and presidential elections, including public funding.
He has served on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and on the Fulton County (Ga.) Board of Registrations and Elections. He is a former vice chairman of the Fairfax County (Va.) Electoral Board and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Board to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
A 1984 graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law, Mr. von Spakovsky received his B.S. degree in 1981 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Americans just voted for their representatives in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm election, and two years ago, they completed census forms. Both of those activities are the direct result of Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution—the census clause—which directs that an “actual Enumeration” be conducted every “ten Years” of our population “in such Manner as [Congress] shall by Law direct.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database now includes 1,412 proven instances of election fraud, and our legal center is monitoring many other ongoing prosecutions.
The database, which provides a sampling of recent election fraud cases, demonstrates the vulnerabilities within the electoral process and the need for reforms to secure free and fair elections for the American people.
As state legislatures begin their 2023 sessions, Americans should know what their states did in 2022 to improve or damage the integrity of the election process.
The Federal Election Commission is responsible for enforcing the act that governs the raising and spending of money in federal campaigns. Last year, the commission dismissed a complaint filed against Twitter and its executives that claimed they had violated federal law. Given the recent public disclosures of internal as well as external Twitter communications with campaign and party organizations, the FEC should reopen that investigation. It must determine if that dismissal was based on false information provided by Twitter.
Alaska and Maine have implemented “ranked choice voting,” a confusing, chaotic method of voting. Georgia should not follow suit.
“Ranked choice” really should be referred to as “rigged choice,” since it effectively disenfranchises voters and allows marginal candidates not supported by a majority of voters to win elections.
The Biden administration’s open-border policies and its refusal to fully enforce federal immigration laws have imposed huge costs on local communities across the country. Border states are groaning under the enormous cost of sheltering, feeding, educating, policing, and providing medical care for tens of thousands of illegal aliens.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the nine liberal members of the Boston City Council displayed crass, partisan opportunism by recently voting to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in local elections.
A polling place under the bipartisan supervision of election officials and the observation of poll watchers has numerous advantages. It helps ensure not only that the ballots are completed by the registered voters and deposited in a locked, sealed ballot box, but also that the voters’ eligibility and identity are verified; that no voters are pressured or coerced to vote a particular way by candidates, party activists, and political guns-for-hire, who are all prohibited from being inside the polling place; and that no ballots get “lost” in the mail or not delivered on time.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Moore v. Harper, a case that turns on the meaning of a key provision in the Constitution outlining the Framers’ structure for congressional elections.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by Texas and Louisiana over Biden administration guidelines that severely restricted the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement of federal immigration law against illegal aliens.
