DOJ politicization hurt voters’ rights; has it hurt Michigan?

Badge reading, 'Let the people vote' (photo: Glynnis Ritchie via Flickr.com)

Over the last several years we’ve heard a lot about politicization at the U.S. Department of Justice, ranging from the hiring of poorly qualified partisans at low levels to the mass dismissal of U.S. attorneys for partisan or ideological reasons. But politicization didn’t stop at hiring and firing; it actively worked against increasing the number of eligible voters,and that could hurt Democrats.

Hans von Spakovsky, for example, was a Bush appointee to the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ; during his tenure with that section, he began efforts to purge states’ voter rolls, as well as blocking three lawsuits that would have charged county and local governments with violating minorities’ voting rights. Former DOJ employees also said that von Spakovsky thwarted two or more investigations into voter discrimination, their claims documented in a letter asking the Senate Rules and Administration Committee to reject von Spakovsky’s nomination by the White House as a member of the Federal Election Committee.

It’s not clear based on readily available information whether the investigations or the lawsuits von Spakovsky impeded were related to Michigan voters.

After a tug of war and a long stalemate over von Spakovsky’s nomination to the FEC, von Spakovsky withdrew his name from nomination and was instead hired by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as a special assistant.

While von Spakovsky is only on board until the federal annual budget runs out in October, observers wonder what influence he could exert during an election season on the work of an organization that is supposed to support minorities’ civil rights. The commission is bipartisan, but only in a formal sense; as six of eight commissioners are Republicans, it can hardly be a neutral entity.

Another controversial member of the DOJ quit in December 2007 after pressure from members of Congress and civil rights groups. John Tanner, as leader of the DOJ’s civil rights division, was under scrutiny for a multitude of questionable management decisions that appeared to be racially biased, along with some rather troublesome comments Tanner made about mortality rates and race in early October 2007. Tanner told the National Latino Congreso, “Creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance … [o]f course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”

Although Tanner claimed the comments were taken out of context, they appeared to outline a personal philosophy biased by age and race. Groups and individuals alike, including Sen. Barack Obama, called for Tanner’s resignation.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Oct. 30, 2007, calling Tanner to testify about his racially charged comments. Tanner appeared both defensive and evasive. He resigned only weeks later in December.

In spite of Tanner’s exit from the DOJ, fallout continues from his tenure. Tanner wrote letters to many states in April 2007 asking their secretaries of state to conduct voter roll purges using an obscure provision of the National Voter Registration Act, under the guise of preventing voter fraud. Exactly how many voters were purged across the country is not clear, but the purging continued an effort begun in 2005 by von Spakovsky that appears to target states that contain concentrations of voters that lean Democratic. The use of the NVRA was also inappropriate as a means of rectifying voter rolls, according to a consultant to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, calling into question both the methodology and the data used.

The degree to which Michigan’s voters have been impacted by Tanner’s push for voter purging is murky, due to the lack of transparency with which the secretary of state’s office has operated under Republican incumbent Terri Lynn Land’s leadership. Voter rights law group the Advancement Project attempted to meet with Land to discuss the purging process, only to have the meeting canceled.

The voter roll purging efforts by von Spakovsky and Tanner are only a portion of the problem with politicization; what else has been done to voters’ rights out of political expediency that we’ve not yet discovered?