In this morning's writeup of Supreme Court's decision on Indiana's voter ID law, The New York Times quoted someone familiar to TPM readers:

"This decision not only confirms the validity of photo ID laws, but it completely vindicates the Bush Justice Department and refutes those critics who claimed that the department somehow acted improperly when it approved Georgia's photo ID law in 2005," said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a former Justice Department official.

It's a reaction laden with a number of distortions. But the key one has to do with a crucial difference between Georgia's 2005 law and Indiana's law, as Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told me. Rich, who last year opposed Spakovsky' nomination to the FEC along with a group of other former voting section professionals, called Spakovsky's contention that yesterday's ruling vindicated his actions "disingenuous."

"The Georgia law reviewed by the Justice Department required voters seeking the required voter ID to pay a fee that a federal court found created an unconstitutional poll tax," Rich said. "But in Indiana the Supreme Court explicitly noted that photo identification cards 'issued by Indiana's [Bureau of Motor Vehicles] are . . . free' and thus there was no issue of creating an unconstitutional poll tax."

Spakovsky and other political appointees overruled staff attorneys who'd recommended against approving Georgia's voter ID law, because of concerns that the law would discriminate against poor and minority voters. It was just a part of Spakovsky's legacy of ignoring and intimidating section employees, and generally doing what he could to effect policies that would disenfranchise voters.

Under the Voting Rights Act, parts of the country with a history of discrimination must demonstrate to the Justice Department that new legislation does not discriminate against minority voters. In the case of Georgia's law, supporters of the law didn't do much of anything to demonstrate that the law wouldn't discriminate against African-Americans.

In fact, quite the opposite. Georgia state Rep. Sue Burmeister, the sponsor of the bill, told voting section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."

Indiana's law had not required review by the Justice Department, Rich said. "Therefore, there was no issue in review of the Indiana law concerning whether the state could meet its burden of demonstrating that the law did not hurt minority voters, as is required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That was the only issue before Justice Department in its review of the Georgia law and career attorneys, in an in-depth memo, found that the law did hurt minority voters and accordingly recommended an objection to the law."

So I think it's fair to say that Spakovsky has yet to be "completely vindicated."

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) shipped to the White House on Tuesday a compromise plan on Federal Election Commission nominees, a deal that is likely dead on arrival because it does not meet GOP demands on Hans von Spakovsky.

"You are aware that Mr. von Spakovsky does not have majority support to win confirmation," Reid wrote Tuesday in a letter to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. "It is my understanding that you have two additional Republican FEC candidates cleared for nomination.

"One would fill Mr. von Spakovsky's seat should he be defeated or withdrawn, and the other would fill the vacant Republican seat," Reid continued. "You already have the non-controversial re-nomination of sitting commissioner David Mason pending."

You can read Reid's letter to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten here. But as Roll Call says, Republicans have thus far refused to budge on any deal that doesn't include Spakovsky getting packaged in a vote with the other less controversial nominees. And so the FEC remains officially dormant and the complaints against allegedly outlaw campaign activity continue to pile up.

Things were already looking pretty hopeless for the FEC, but they just got bleaker. In a letter to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) says that Robert Lenhard, one of the Democratic nominees for the commission, has withdrawn his name because of the ongoing stalemate.

It will most likely take "several months" to replace Lenhard, Reid writes, meaning that it's sure to be awhile before Democrats and Republicans can agree on a batch of nominees. Not that there have been any signs of hope anyway: Democrats continue to insist that the Senate vote on vote-suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky separately from the other three nominees, and Republicans refuse to allow that.

Meanwhile, the fracas over John McCain's withdrawal from public financing goes unresolved and outside groups are mounting up without worry of any imminent harassment from the FEC.

Update: By way of explanation, Lenhard has landed a gig (sub. req.) at the mega firm Covington & Burling.

Hans von Spakovsky's legacy is still being felt down in Florida. From the AP:

Florida can temporarily enforce a law that disqualifies any voter registration where the Social Security or driver license numbers on the application can't be matched with government databases, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta said a lower court shouldn't have ordered a temporary injunction in December that prevented Florida from enforcing an anti-fraud law that dismissed applications when matches couldn't be made.

As we reported last year, one of Spakovsky's achievements while at the Justice Department was promoting this interpretation of the law: that states ought to reject voter applications if the data did not match driver's license or Social Security records. Civil rights groups, calling the measure "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy," sued to halt the law in an attempt to minimize the effect on the 2008 election. A newspaper investigation found that the measure resulted in tens of thousands of voters being rejected, the overwhelming majority of them minorities.

Back in December, a district court agreed with the argument by the groups -- the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project -- that the law ought to be halted from going into effect while the lawsuit was decided. That decision was overturned yesterday.

"Yesterday's ruling by the appellate court represents a setback for all eligible Floridians, particularly voters of color, who wish to register to vote and participate in the upcoming presidential elections," said Elizabeth Westfall of Advancement Project, one of the attorneys for the groups. But Justin Levitt, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that the suit would go on and that "the trial court must now consider whether disenfranchising thousands of eligible citizens because of typos, is consistent with the U.S. Constitution."

Last time we checked in on Hans von Spakovsky, the vote suppression guru was doggedly making the case for voter ID laws.

Now Angelenos have a chance to sample his wisdom. On April 2nd, Spakovsky will be speaking to the Los Angeles chapter of the Federalist Society. The title of the lecture is "Litigating Elections: the Campaign Process in 2008" -- characteristic of a man who's shown a genius for using the law to affect elections.

While Spakovsky is spreading the gospel, the White House and Republicans have still refused to back down from his nomination to the Federal Election Commission. The Dems, meanwhile, refuse to allow him to be slipped through with the other FEC nominees. Which is why the FEC remains unable to act.

Thanks to TPM Reader KA for the tip.

OK, so Hans von Spakovsky's nomination to the Federal Election Commission has left the Senate hopelessly gridlocked, and the FEC crippled. And he packed his bags and left the building months ago. But the man is still keeping busy.

The vote suppression expert has just released his latest call-to-arms on the voter ID front at the Heritage Foundation. It's called "Stolen Identities, Stolen Votes: A Case Study in Voter Impersonation."

In it, Spakovsky takes on those liberal critics who claim that there's no voter fraud (like, say, The New York Times) by unearthing a 1984 grand jury investigation in Brooklyn, NY during which, he says, numerous episodes of voter fraud dating back to 1968 were uncovered.

Just because the case was 24 years ago and no indictments were issued shouldn't give us pause. The point is that it's evidence that fraud does occur. And therefore there's a strong case for requiring ID at the polls. And if the law disproportionately disenfranchises minority voters, I guess that's just collateral damage. The Supreme Court is expected to decide by late June whether Indiana's voter ID law is unconstitutional.

So you can see that Spakovsky is still on the case, though thankfully not still at the Justice Department, where he took a number of steps that had the effect of making it more difficult for minorities to vote. Bush put Spakovsky on the FEC by a recess appointment in December, 2005.

As voting law expert Rick Hasen points out, the piece is a brazen move for a guy who's been accused of being too partisan. Apparently Spakovsky is not holding out for winning Democrats over.

A recent report (pdf) by the Election Assistance Commission's inspector general served as a reminder for why Spakovsky is so controversial. In it, former Commissioner Paul DeGregorio, a Republican who frequently clashed with Spakovsky when he was at the Justice Department, is quoted as saying that "too many of [von Spakovsky's] decisions are clouded by his partisan thinking" and that Spakovsky thought that DeGregorio should use his position to advance the Republican Party's agenda.

Anticipating the 2008 election, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced a bill to ban "vote caging," the term for a time-tested GOP vote suppression technique.

To "cage" voters, operatives send out a mass mailing with "do not forward" labels. Those names attached to addresses that bounce back are put on a challenge list, which is then used to challenge those voters when they come to the polls. GOPers in states all over the country have used the technique for decades, especially targeting mostly African-American areas. Timothy Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who replaced one of the fired prosecutors in Arkansas, was forced to defend his role in an alleged 2004 caging scheme when he worked for the Republican National Committee.

A number of powerful senators are backing a similar bill in the Senate, including Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

You can read the text of Conyers' bill here. A bullet point summary provided by his office is below.

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The changes keep on coming in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Less than a month ago, former voting section chief John "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first" Tanner got canned. And today, his replacement, Christopher Coates, a veteran of the section, demoted Tanner's controversial deputy chiefs, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere and Yvette Rivera. The changes were announced in an email to voting section staff.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating whether Lorenzo-Giguere had filed certain lawsuits in order to get paid while living at her Cape Cod beach house. Tanner was under investigating for approving the arrangement. Both were accused by former section lawyers in complaints to OPR and the inspector general of seeking reimbursement for official travel.

Rivera has been accused of discriminating against African-American employees. She oversaw the important Section Five unit, which has the responsibility of reviewing election laws in parts of the country with a history of discrimination. Encouragingly, her replacement is Tim Mellett, one of the staff attorneys who in 2003, found that Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act, a finding that was overruled by political appointees.

So it seems that the voting section is truly entering a new era. Whether the voting section will reassume its traditional responsibility of protecting African-American voters from discrimination is another question. Only time will tell.

Pretty much as expected, with Judge Anthony Kennedy as the key swing vote. From the AP:

The Supreme Court appeared reluctant Wednesday to strike down the nation's strictest requirement that voters show photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot....

"You want us to invalidate the statute because of minimal inconvenience?" Justice Anthony Kennedy said near the end of an hour-long argument. Kennedy, often a key vote, appeared more willing than some to consider changes to the law....

Chief Justice John Roberts, an Indiana native, and Justice Antonin Scalia indicated strong support for the state law. Justice Clarence Thomas said nothing, but most often votes with his conservative colleagues....

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg focused her questions on the difficulties for indigent voters who lack IDs. Why, she asked, can't the state allow those voters to sign the sworn statement on Election Day, which would eliminate the second trip to the county courthouse?

Told Indiana wants to avoid congestion at the polls, Ginsburg said the state wants to have it both ways because it argues relatively few people are affected by the law. "If there are so few of them, I don't understand why they should be put to the burden," Ginsburg said.

Here's a detailed rundown from SCOTUSblog.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether Indiana's voter ID law breaks the law. If a law disenfranchises thousands of voters (mostly poor and minorities) to prevent a phantom crime, is that ok?

Of course, it's rare to hear the Republican supporters of voter ID laws admit that there's no evidence that voter impersonation, the kind of voter fraud the laws are meant to stop, occurs.

But that's just what happened yesterday when Warren Olney of KCRW's To The Point pressed Todd Rokita (R), Indiana's secretary of state and a named defendant in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Have any cases of voter impersonation been prosecuted in Indiana? was the simple question. And as Olney pressed, Rokita went from one fallback argument to another. It started with this revealing exchange:

Q: ...Have there been cases in Indiana where people represented themselves as somebody else in order to be able to vote?

Rokita: Oh yeah, we suspect it happens all the time.

Q: You suspect?

Rokita: Mm hmm.

Q: Have you got any cases proven?

Rokita: Well, are you saying you want to define whether or not there’s fraud based on whether or not it’s prosecuted? Is that the question?

From there, Rokita argued that there is fraud (it "exists almost on a daily basis"), but that it's nearly impossible to prosecute due to the ephemeral nature of the crime. And it tends not to be a priority for prosecutors due to all the other violent and horrible stuff they need to prosecute. And even if there hasn't been any such voter fraud (and I'm not saying that there isn't), we have a right to protect ourselves from it; "You have the right to build a firehouse before you get burned by the fire."

It bears mentioning here that the Justice Department under George Bush has indeed made prosecuting voter fraud a priority -- and came up empty. That fact hasn't stopped voter ID law proponents from claiming hundreds of demonstrated cases of voter fraud. It's quite a morass of innuendo, but the Brennan Center (which has filed an amicus brief with the law's opponents) undertook the staggering task of disproving every one of those claims one by one. It's a 75 page document (pdf).

The lawyers actually arguing the case before the court today are likely to be more eloquent than Rokita, but the arguments will essentially be the same. So take a look at the relevant excerpts from the interview below.

via Rick Hasen.

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It's pretty fitting that one day after one of the biggest events this campaign season, the New Hampshire primaries, the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments on a case that could significantly affect the 2008 election: the fight over Indiana's voter ID law.

The issues behind Crawford v. Marion County Election Board are pretty simple to understand. The Indiana law, passed by Republicans, prevents citizens from voting without a picture ID, and they say it will stop voter fraud, though they can't point to a single instance of criminal voter impersonation occurring in the state. It is a solution in search of a problem.

Or rather, it's a solution to a very different problem. In this issue of New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes that the voter ID laws, which Republicans have pushed in states throughout the country, are a reminder that, though racism has disappeared from mainstream political discourse, "racial discrimination itself" has not been banished from politics:

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” Terence T. Evans, the dissenting Court of Appeals judge in the Indiana case, slyly wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” He’s not the only one to notice: the three federal judges who approved the Indiana law were appointed by a Republican President; the lone dissenter was appointed by a Democrat. It was also Republican-dominated legislatures that produced the Indiana and Georgia laws, both of which were signed by Republican governors.

Who are the “certain folks,” in Judge Evans’s delicate phrase, that the Indiana law is trying to discourage? The best answer can be found in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case filed by twenty-nine leading historians and scholars of voting rights. They concluded that the Indiana law belongs to a malign tradition in “this nation’s history of disfranchising people of color and poor whites under the banner of ‘reform.’ ” Such measures as the poll tax and literacy tests, they write, were “billed as anti-fraud or anti-corruption devices; yet through detailed provisions within them, they produced a discriminatory effect (often intended) within the particular historical context.” So it will be in Indiana, where the law creates a series of onerous barriers to voting.

And don't forget that the United States government, by way of the Justice Department, has weighed in to support the Republican side of the argument. As election law expert Rick Hasen has pointed out, the fight over voter ID laws has been strictly partisan -- Republicans push and support the laws, Republican-appointed judges uphold them, and recently Republican secretaries of state have written amicus briefs in support of Indiana's law. So the Bush Administration's decision shouldn't surprise.

The court will deliver a decision by late June, in time to affect the November elections. As for what's likely to happen Wednesday, Toobin himself is not optimistic about the outcome of the arguments:

As a general matter, in recent years the Court has been reluctant to find what is charged in this case: a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. (The notable exception, to belabor the issue, was for a plaintiff named George W. Bush.) In the end, though, it will not be the judiciary that rescues democracy; whatever the obstacles, the problems with the ballot box must be solved at the ballot box. In the end, though, it will not be the judiciary that rescues democracy; whatever the obstacles, the problems with the ballot box must be solved at the ballot box.

Note: Here's The New York Times' rundown of the case.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Hans von Spakovsky threw in the towel on New Years Eve, in an e-mail sent out to supporters....

"Today was my last official day as a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission," he wrote. "The Senate officially adjourned today without acting on my nomination... I wanted to thank everyone for their support over the past two years while I was going through this confirmation battle. All of the telephone calls, emails and notes I received from people were great encouragement for me."

Von Spakovsky attached an endorsement by the Wall Street Journal, though he added that "it did not help in the end in convincing the Democrats to vote to confirm me."

I'll guess he'll just have to intimidate federal employees and work to disenfranchise minorities from outside the government now.

Is it the end for Hans von Spakovsky?

From what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said on the Senate floor last night, it appears so. Given the ongoing opposition to Spakovsky by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI), Reid called for a vote on the individual nominees to the Federal Election Commission. But the Republican leadership, as they have from the beginning, insisted on voting on the four nominees, both Democratic and Republican, together, thus protecting Spakovsky from being voted down, but also preventing the confirmation of any of the other nominees.

At the end of the year, von Spakovsky's recess appointment to the commission will expire. Of course, that could lead to other problems, but our favorite vote-suppression guru wouldn't be one of them.

Reid's remarks are below.

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Jeez. Not only is Hans von Spakovsky's FEC nomination bound up in the Senate, but one of his pet causes, having states reject voter applications if the data does not match driver's license or Social Security records, has hit a snag in Florida.

Civil rights groups argued that the policy amounted to "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy." Now a federal judge has agreed:

U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle on Tuesday sided with the NAACP's request for a preliminary injunction suspending Florida's 2-year-old "voter match" law while courts decide whether it violates federal laws protecting the right to vote....

Lawyers for Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning contended the matching process is required to prevent voter fraud....

But in his order Tuesday, Mickle wrote that Florida's match law "stands as an obstacle" to the objectives of the federal Help America Vote Act, by making it harder to vote.

"Though it is true that prevention of voter fraud and prevention of voter disenfranchisement were both goals of HAVA, the impetus for the Act was to respond to the millions of votes that went uncounted -- not the millions of incidents of voter registration fraud," Mickle wrote.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), who called on Justice Department officials to fire John Tanner back in October, has a glass-half-empty view of Tanner's resignation. A statement just out:

"It's unacceptable that the Administration is simply shuffling deck chairs by moving Mr. Tanner to another important position in the Justice Department. During his tenure, he made offensive, intolerant comments about minorities in an attempt to defend voter identification laws that threaten voting rights, and that's why I called on him to be fired. It's time we restore confidence in the Department by appointing public servants who are truly committed to upholding our civil rights."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) responding to John Tanner's resignation:

“Mr. Tanner had a clear record of undermining the core mission of the section – protecting the right to vote. In October, my subcommittee held an investigation on the Section, where it became clear that Mr. Tanner was actively seeking to curtail that cornerstone of American democracy. The right to vote is the foundation of all our liberties and it must be protected.

“Indeed, under Mr. Tanner’s leadership, the Justice Department essentially took positions that disenfranchised minorities and the elderly. The departure of Mr. Tanner presents an opportunity for a fresh start of the Voting Section. I urge the Bush Administration to take this opportunity to take politics out of voting rights enforcement by appointing a new chief with a commitment to the letter and the spirit of the Voting Rights Act.”

Update: And here's House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI):

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Today, John Tanner resigned from his position effective immediately as chief of the Civil Rights Division's voting section. His resignation email, with the subject line "Moving On" was sent out at approximately 11 AM to voting section staff. He said that he will be moving on to the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. The email is reproduced below in full.

With Tanner, it had seemed like a matter of not if, but when. As we reported late last month, his travel habits had angered attorneys in the voting section, leading to an investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

And that was after his comments about the tendency of minorities to "die first" led Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and others to call for his removal. When he went before the House Judiciary Committee in October, he was lambasted for his tendency of "basing your conclusions on stereotypes" (like, say, claiming that African-Americans have IDs more than whites because they're always going to cash-checking businesses).

But most of all, Tanner's reign is notable for his collusion with the political appointees who oversaw the section, an ongoing effort to reverse the Civil Rights Division's traditional role in protecting minority voters, particularly African-Americans, into one of aiding thinly disguised vote suppression measures (most infamously Georgia's voter ID law). It was an effort that some career DoJ attorneys later described as "institutional sabotage."

Who'll be taking over? We've got a question into DoJ to see.

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Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) responding to today's news that the Justice Department had weighed in with an amicus brief in support of Indiana's voter ID law:

“Once again the Bush Justice Department has gone to court to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, and minorities. Voter I.D. laws have rightly been struck down in the past. The Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which I chair, recently held a hearing on this very subject. The evidence we obtained clearly demonstrates that these laws do nothing to protect the integrity of elections, but do a great deal to erect a needless barrier to voter participation. The Justice Department is charged under the law with the duty to protect the right to vote. Sadly, the Bush administration has chosen to oppose voting rights.”

Signaling that things haven't changed all that much at the Justice Department, the DoJ has filed an amicus brief (pdf) with the Supreme Court in support of Indiana's voter ID law.

The decision to file the brief in and of itself will prove controversial, but beyond that, opponents say that the brief's argument would set a standard that stacks the deck in favor of vote suppression measures and against those who challenge them. Arguments in the case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, are set to be heard by the Court in January.

In the 42-page brief (pdf), the Department argues that Indiana's law is a "reasonable administrative rule that furthers the State's compelling interest in combating voter fraud." Alleged voter fraud, of course, has been a continual preoccupation of the Department, even leading to the firing of at least two of the nine U.S. attorneys in the Gonzales-era purge, despite overwhelming evidence that such fraud is extremely rare and even then hardly ever intentional.

In a statement, the Brennan Center for Justice, which has filed an amicus brief against the law and calls the case "the most important voting rights case since Bush v. Gore," denounced the Department's argument as an "extreme legal position." If accepted, the group argues, the standard set would mean "that there could be virtually no challenges to laws suppressing the vote before an election....

This means that any law meant to suppress the vote would have already accomplished its goal of disenfranchising voters before it could be challenged in Court. Their position, taken to its logical extent, would allow jurisdictions to suppress the votes of tens of thousands of voters before a single aggrieved voter could get their day in Court."

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Ever since September, the nomination for accomplished vote suppression expert Hans von Spakovsky to be a member of the Federal Election Commission has been snagged, stopped by the public opposition of Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) and the somewhat more private opposition of Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

The Republican leadership countered the Democrats by insisting that von Spakovsky's nomination was all or nothing -- either von Spakovsky went through or none of the nominated commissioners did. That means that if no compromise is reached by the end of the year, the FEC, which makes rules governing election spending, might effectively shut down in an election year, since it would be left with only two commissioners out of six seats. As we reported back in October, that could create a situation where outside groups funded by millionaires (like the Swift Boat Vets) could run amok in a campaign year.

Roll Call gives (sub. req.) an update of sorts this morning. The short version: things are still at a standstill, but "various scenarios currently are circulating" to avoid a shutdown. One scenario: von Spakovsky could withdraw and the problem would go away. Another: the White House and Senate could join together to make a new round of nominations. Or another: "the deck of current commission recess appointees may be reshuffled and re-recess appointed, a complicated and likely unprecedented strategy." Stay tuned.

When John Tanner, chief of the Civil Rights Division's voting section, appeared before a Congressional panel last month, he was upbraided by Democrats for his "ineffectiveness." Little did they know that as the section, probably the most politicized in the Justice Department under the Bush Administration, has done less and less to protect African-American voters from discrimination, Tanner has been seeing the country on the taxpayers' dime.

He even managed to make taxpayer-funded trips to Hawaii in three consecutive years, two of them a week long. One Department lawyer who accompanied Tanner on his first trip took the earliest available flight back after having completed all necessary work in just two business days. But Tanner insisted on staying a full week, despite the lack of apparent Department business. It's a crime for government officials to use public funds for personal travel.

A review of Justice Department documents obtained by TPMmuckraker shows just how extensive Tanner's travel has been. From May of 2005 when Tanner became chief of the section through the end of 2006, he took 36 trips, traveling 97 days over those 19 months. By comparison, Tanner's predecessor Joe Rich took only two trips from 2003 through his retirement in April 2005, a total of six days of taxpayer funded travel over those 28 months.

"It's important for a chief to be in the office to run the office," Rich told me, explaining why he'd traveled so little. Most of his travel was for voting rights conferences and speaking engagements, he said. Chiefs rarely travel for cases, he said.

Voting section lawyers, upset with Tanner's abuse of his authority as chief, have filed at least two complaints in recent months with the Justice Department inspector general concerning Tanner's travel and other issues (you can read one here). Another complaint, which we published last month, dealt with the travel of Tanner's deputy Susana Lorenzo-Giguere. A Department spokesman said then that the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) was investigating whether Lorenzo-Giguere had filed certain lawsuits in order to get paid while living at her Cape Cod beach house. Tanner is also under investigation for approving that arrangement. It's unclear whether OPR is also investigating other trips by Tanner or Lorenzo-Giguere.

In the meantime, according to two sources, both Tanner and acting section deputy Susana Lorenzo-Giguere have been banned indefinitely from any further travel. The Justice Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

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Earlier this month, we reported on a Florida law that requires the state to reject voter registration applications if the data does not match driver's license or Social Security records. The law, first implemented in January, 2006, was based on advice from Hans von Spakovsky -- yet another addition to his legacy of voter suppression at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Civil rights groups, calling the measure "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy," have sued to halt the law in an attempt to minimize the effect on the 2008 election.

This weekend, Southwest Florida's News-Press ran an analysis of state records, and, well, the law seems to have had a predictable effect (enjoy the spin from election officials):

County election officials say the number of voters lost through Florida's central registration system is small -- 90 percent of applications get voter cards.

The result is applications from more than 43,000 Floridians hoping to become eligible voters over the past 21 months were rejected by state computer programs and kicked out for special review.

More than 14,000 initially rejected -- three-quarters of them minorities -- didn't make it through that last set of hoops.

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

As for von Spakovsky, his nomination to be a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission remains stuck in the Senate, due to the opposition of Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI).

Ed. Note: Thanks to TPMm Reader KH for the catch.

Hans von Spakovsky, whose nomination for the Federal Election Commission is currently stalled in the Senate, may have left the Justice Department in 2005, but his influence remains. A prime example is in Florida, where the state legislature, evidently following von Spakovsky's advice, passed a law that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters. Now civil rights groups are trying to stop the law before it affects the 2008 elections.

The law, scheduled to go in effect in January, would require the state to reject voter registrations if the state cannot match the information on registration applications to driver's license or Social Security records. Because such records tend to be riddled with errors, tens of thousands of "perfectly eligible voters" will be knocked off the rolls, the NAACP and other groups charged in a lawsuit this September, resulting in "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy." Compounding the problem, the law shortened the number of days that rejected voters have to present evidence that they're a legitimate voter from three to two days.

Florida was just one of a number of states that adopted such a law after von Spakovsky, then a lawyer with the Civil Rights Division, issued a letter to Maryland's attorney general in 2003 advising that the Help American Vote Act required states to reject voter registrations that did not match databases.

Joe Rich, the 40-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division who was then the chief of the voting section, told me that von Spakovsky wrote the letter without consulting him. Rich called it a "very strict reading of the law" which would "disenfranchise a lot of people" and compared it to Florida's disastrous attempt to purge ex-felons from the voter rolls in 2000 (a purge that was also von Spakovsky's brain child.)

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