Okay, okay: “Toht” from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky — by the bye, a perfect name for a Bond villain — aren’t the same person. But I’m sure they’d be really good friends if they could meet.
The Heritage Foundation is a neoconservative “think tank” founded by brewery heir Joseph Coors, whose brother William once described him as being “a little bit to the right of Attila the Hun”.
Unlike many other conservative think tanks and organizations, who had prominent “never-Trumpers” in their ranks, the Heritage Foundation made it clear early in Trump’s presidential campaign that they were backing him. It’s probably less of a testament to their belief in his leadership skills, and more a belief that they could take advantage of his vanity and venality.
Their play paid off: As CNN observed in 2017, no other organization had “that kind of footprint in the transition”. At least 66 Heritage Foundation employees and alumni were given positions in the Trump administration, and a number of people in their database have become members of Trump’s cabinet, including the veritable rogue’s gallery of:
If you’re wondering why the current U.S. government is a basket case, a lot of the blame has to go to the Heritage Foundation, who’ve installed a clown car of chaos agents, whose primary qualification is that they passed their ideological sniff test.
The most telling thing about voter fraud is who says it’s real and who says it’s a myth:
Says voter fraud happens a lot and that voting by mail opens the door to more fraud | Says voter fraud is quite rare and that the fearmongering about voting by mail isn’t justified |
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That left column reads like the Legion of Doom, while the right column (with the notable exception of the Federalist, who are inconsistent as they are bonkers), comprises some reasonable, respectable sources of information.
You probably remember this tweet of Trump’s, which contains two untruths…
…but you might not remember the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a.k.a. the Voter Fraud Commission. Trump established it, Mike Pence served as the chair, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach served as vice chair and day-to-day administrator.
Here’s the short version of the story, as told in Netflix’s Whose Vote Counts, Explained documentary:
For all their bluster about the important job they were doing, the commission was disbanded after eight months and meeting only twice. The Trump administration, having received a court order to share its working documents with its Democratic members, decided that they would just take their ball and go home.
This is hardly surprising. Sharing those documents would likely poke holes in a lot of their arguments, given the Commission’s vice chair’s cavalier approach to quaint, old-fashioned notions like evidence and proof:
The Washington Post, with the help of the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), analyzed the data from three states who did mail-in voting. Out of 14.6 million votes cast by mail in 2016 and 2018 in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, officials were able to identify only 372 possible cases of someone voting twice or someone voting using a dead person’s identity. Even if all 372 cases turned out to be actual voter fraud, that would make just 1 in 40,000 votes illegitimate. To get a sense of how rare voter fraud was in that sample, think of it this way:
You’re more likely to find a four-leaf clover (the odds are 1 in 10,000) than a fraudulent mail-in ballot from two years of elections in those three states.
He’s the guy at the end of Raiders whose face melted off!
No — actually, he’s an attorney, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, the manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Law Reform Initiative, and the go-to guy for Republican alarmism about voter fraud.
Trump made von him a member of the Voter Fraud Commission, and von Spakovsky worked hard to dickishly tilt the scales with an email arguing against letting Democrats and what he called “mainstream Republicans” from being allowed into the group. Simply put, he was afraid of letting in people who might not be extremist enough for his tastes.
This is a pattern with von Spakovsky. During his time at the Justice Department, he…
Von Spakovsky is so wrong about voter fraud that he has an entire section on his Wikipedia page titled False claims about voter fraud.
It includes these gems:
A quick view of his career shows a man disliked by his coworkers and who’s also bad at his job. Von Spakovsky would very clearly fail both “Two Beers and a Puppy” tests.
What do you do when you’re a failed civil servant whose work has been discredited and actually written up in district court proceedings as as sloppy and wrong?
You go to the most most gullible, easily-scared chumps who’ve also somehow “failed up” into positions of power or influence. In the Trump era, that’s the Republicans.
Since the spring, von Spakovsky has been holding secret meetings about voter fraud with state election officials. But even though elections are a bipartisan issue, only Republicans are invited to von Spakovsky’s meetings.
The “goal” of the meetings, held remotely, is to “gather the chief state election officials together to strategize on advancing their shared goal of ensuring the integrity of the elections they administer in their home states,” an invitation to an early August event reads.
It appears that “ensuring the integrity of the elections” means spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the voting process, especially among higher-ranking people in government. This is straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook:
Von Spakovsky has hosted at least two of these remote meetings in recent months. In April, there was an hourlong “Election Administration Forum Conference Call” that covered, in part, the expansion of mail-in voting and “ways to message these concerns to your constituents,” according to the invitation. The event included the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees elections and five staffers, one of whom went on to work for the Trump campaign two months later. An August meeting, conducted through a secure, virtual video conferencing platform, was scheduled to last for two hours, according to an invitation.
What is really worrisome was the inclusion of Cameron Quinn from the Department of Homeland Security, who was going to be the group’s “liaison to the election community.”
Quinn has worked as an elections official in Virginia with von Spakovsky and has co-taught a law school course with him. During the meeting, she provided her cellphone number to the attendees.
The announcement of her role apparently came as a surprise to Washington officials, including the state’s director of elections, the emails show. The director, a member of a five-person committee that regularly interacts with DHS over election security matters, told her colleagues that there is a point of contact within the agency — and it’s not Quinn.
Here’s some worthwhile reading and viewing on the topics of voter fraud and Hans von Spakovsky…
Here’s the The Right to Vote episode of Netflix’s Whose Vote Counts, Explained series:
Trump, Inc. is a podcast jointly produced by NPR radio station WNYC and ProPublica. One of their recent episodes is Block the Vote, which looks at voter disenfranchisement, and quite naturally, features von Spakovsky.
You can listen to it using the controller below:
And finally, here are some articles on von Spakovsky and his voter fraud fraud:
And in case you needed proof, here’s the press release from the office of New…
The saying is doubly true for anyone who works under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “No…
This recent article in the New York Times [it’s a gift link, you’ll be able…
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