Thu 3/17 @ noon
One of the most irritating things about much of the broadcast media today is how they’ll let politicians, party spokespeople and “experts” recite bald-faced lies without pushback or real-time fact-checking, often saying that “balance” is provided by airing an opposing view some other time.
Enter this week’s presentation by the Akron Roundtable — “a community forum to invite engaging speakers to Akron and bring bold, creative and new ideas to the region” — of Hans von Spakovsky. Currently a senior legal fellow at the rightwing Heritage Foundation, he runs something deceptively called the “Election Law Reform Initiative.” The laughable stated topic of the forum, which takes place at the Quaker Station on the University of Akron campus, is “Election Integrity – The Key to Preserving Our Democratic Republic.”
The topic is laughable because of von Spakovsky’s well-documented history when it comes to election integrity, something he believes in about as much as the Republicans on the Ohio redistricting commission believe in fair, constitutional maps. He claims, “The U.S. has a long and unfortunate history of election fraud, and we must take steps to deter and prevent it.”
That’s false. As we saw in 2020, the claim that there is a history of widespread election fraud is used as an excuse to make voting more difficult, especially for certain types of people: voters of color, poor voters, older people, those on reservations. Even the cases of fraud we saw — about a dozen in all, almost all Trump voters — show how difficult it is to commit voter fraud: virtually all involved a voter who had access to the mail-in ballot of a dead spouse or parent who was still registered. That’s exceedingly rare.
Von Spakovsky first surfaced as a member of the George Bush legal team during the 2000 Florida vote counting. Bush rewarded him with an appointment to the civil rights division of the Department of Justice where he earned a reputation for politicizing the nonpartisan department by focusing on ways to BLOCK voters from exercising their civil rights. According to a Washington Post article of June 2007, “During his tenure, more than half of the career lawyers in the voting section left in protest.” He opposed re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act in its entirety when, as we’ve seen, the U.S. Supreme Court overturning just part of it has led to a huge increase in voter suppression laws. He used his lies about the ubiquity of voter fraud to advocate for extremely restrictive voter ID laws. Almost all the cases he cited of in-person voter fraud fell apart under investigation.
The Akron Roundtable tells us that von Spakovsky “explains that election integrity is a fundamental requirement of a functioning democratic republic and that we must ensure that every eligible American is able to vote and that their vote is not negated by fraud, errors, mistakes, or other problems. Election reform should be a bipartisan concern that ensures both access and security.”
But it’s been proven over and over — especially given the flood of specious charges about the 2020 presidential election — that “fraud, errors, mistakes” aren’t the problem with our elections, unless minor “mistakes” are used to disqualify voters, as is currently happening in Texas, and that access is of no interest to people like von Spakovsky. The title of his 2021 book gives away his game: Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote. It wasn’t some conspiratorial “left” that tried to “break” the 2020 elections: it was Donald Trump and his enablers. There’s nothing “bold,” “creative” or “new” about von Spakovsky’s attacks on democracy.
As a bonus, he’s also a climate change denier.
As part of its Point/Counterpoint series on elections, Akron Roundtable previously presented a virtual forum with Jessica Jones Capperell of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters on expanding voter access and ending discrimination: the opposite of how von Spakovsky has spent his career. The only way this would have been valid is have the two speakers side by side in real time. Otherwise, it’s presenting von Spakovsky’s views and his dark, anti-democratic history without comment or challenge.
Tickets are $25 and include lunch, if you can stomach it.