Hans von Spakovsky, Author at American Constitutional Rights Union

About Hans von Spakovsky

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.

The Latest Federal Takeover of Elections Violates Federal Law

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:05-05:00August 4th, 2022|

Democrats haven’t stopped trying to take over elections, they just have new tactics to do so under voters’ noses.Employees throughout the federal government who are carrying out President Joe Biden’s executive order directing them to get involved in state elections are likely all violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, besides interfering in the election process and using federal resources in what seems to be a get-out-the-vote operation for the party in power in the White House.

Hans von Spakovsky: DOJ’s Partisan Shell Game Raises Ethics Issues About Pamela Karlan

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:07-05:00August 1st, 2022|

As a tenured law professor at Stanford University, Pamela Karlan earned $1 million a year. We now know that she stayed on the Stanford payroll, at that same impressive salary, during the entire 17 months she served as the Justice Department’s principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. Ms. Karlan left her DOJ post on July 1, just one day before the department delivered documents to the American Accountability Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed her unorthodox and ethically suspect arrangement with the Biden administration.

Hans von Spakovsky: Latest Election Fraud Cases Underscore Importance of Election Integrity

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:09-05:00July 21st, 2022|

With the latest cases of impersonation, registration fraud, absentee ballot fraud, bribery, and illegal vote trafficking added to The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, the database now contains 1,365 proven instances of election fraud. These cases demonstrate the wide variety of ways in which bad actors set out to submit fraudulent ballots or steal elections.The database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all election fraud in the states. Rather, it presents a sampling of recent, proven instances of election fraud from across the country that is intended to highlight the many ways in which fraud has been committed.

Hans von Spakovsky: Ensuring That Only US Citizens Vote

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:10-05:00July 19th, 2022|

The latest politically motivated lawsuit—filed against Arizona by the Biden Justice Department over the state’s new law attempting to verify the citizenship of registered voters—demonstrates the importance of a bill just introduced by Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., HR 8223, that would stop that lawsuit in its tracks.

Hans von Spakovsky: Election audits should be required in every state after every election

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:14-05:00July 7th, 2022|

Financial audits are standard practice in the business world. Election audits also should be standard practice in every state after every election. Audits would determine whether the election was administered honestly, fairly, accurately and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. Yet audits of election agencies, procedures and systems are almost nonexistent in America. The very concept of comprehensive election audits has been criticized and opposed by some election officials and even by the current U.S. Department of Justice.

Hans von Spakovsky: Thomas Fires Warning Shot at Media, Organizations That Lie About Conservatives

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:16-05:00June 30th, 2022|

If you are a private figure and The New York Times or the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes a lie about you, you simply have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation. The fact that the publisher didn’t know or care that the statement was false is irrelevant. But if you are a “public figure,” you not only have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation, but that the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” And the definition of who is a public figure constantly has expanded since 1964.

Hans von Spakovsky: This Supreme Court Ruling Will Prove Vital to Defending Voter ID

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:16-05:00June 29th, 2022|

The Supreme Court’s important ruling last week on voter ID in North Carolina has been overlooked in the fervor over the high court’s spot-on decisions upholding the Second Amendment and religious freedom and overruling Roe v. Wade. But the court’s procedural decision Thursday in Berger v. NAACP will help prevent state officials from sabotaging the defense of state election laws and other measures being attacked by their political allies and friends.

Hans von Spakovsky: If Garland, Local Prosecutor Won’t Protect Justices, Virginia Governor and State AG Must Act

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:17-05:00June 28th, 2022|

With U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano refusing to enforce federal and state laws against the pro-abortion protesters who are intimidating and threatening Supreme Court justices and their families who live in Virginia, it’s time for Gov. Glenn Youngkin and state Attorney General Jason Miyares to step in and use their statutory power to arrest, prosecute, and seek the maximum penalty for every day the protesters are violating the law. The lack of action by Garland and Descano is encouraging the “summer of rage,” leading not only to the arrest of an individual who wanted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but also attacks on pro-life charities and pregnancy resource centers.

Hans von Spakovsky: High court upholds democracy in Dobbs abortion decision

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:36:18-05:00June 28th, 2022|

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the notorious 1973 decision that wrote abortion rights into law. Critics of the court’s new ruling overlook a crucial fact: By throwing out one of the most anti-democratic court decisions in the past 100 years, the justices have upheld the democratic process. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court finally acknowledged what was readily evident back in 1973: Roe was an illegitimate decision in which seven justices simply created a nonexistent constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Roe was an ideological decision, an exercise in judicial policymaking with no basis in the law. Rather, it was a sad example of the court acting as a super-legislature to override the views of the public and their elected legislators in the states.

Hans von Spakovsky: Dirty tricks more sophisticated

By Hans von Spakovsky|2023-03-06T11:55:53-05:00June 17th, 2022|

June 17 marks the 50th anniversary of the night when D.C. police arrested five men breaking into the Watergate hotel/office/apartment complex. The burglars were operatives of President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. Their mission: to tap phones and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee, which had its headquarters in the Watergate.

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