From McClatchy:
WASHINGTON — A former senior Justice Department official has backed off sworn Senate testimony that he consulted with senior agency voting-rights lawyers before inaccurately advising Arizona officials they could deny thousands of voters their rights to provisional ballots.
Hans von Spakovsky, who hopes to win confirmation to a full six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, revised his statement in a recent letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee after former senior department voting-rights lawyers challenged his veracity.
In sworn testimony to the SJC,
von Spakovsky testified that he wouldn't have acted on his own in drafting a letter in April 2005 offering legal guidance to Arizona Secretary of State Janice Brewer on how to apply the state's new, toughest-in-the-nation voter identification law. Von Spakovsky assured senators that he would have acted only after consulting with the Voting Rights Section, characterizing himself as a middleman who didn't make policy.
But according to Joseph Rich, the then-current Voting Rights chief:
said von Spakovsky never consulted with him about it and that Bradshaw had had virtually no involvement in voting rights matters before signing it. Rich said he'd asked Alex Acosta, who was then the civil rights chief, about the letter and Acosta had replied, ``What are you talking about? Send me the letter.''
von Spakovsky also neglected to run the letter through the Election Assistance Commission, an agency created by HAVA, which according to Ray Martinez, an EAC commissioner, came as a "major (and unwelcome) surprise".
Now that von Spakovsky has made this admission, this hopefully will kill any chance of him being confirmed for the FEC commissioner position that he is currently up for. Six years of practices like this will kill any chance of having fair elections in this country. Contact your Senators and make sure they are aware of this information, so that this nomination can be killed for good.
UPDATED: I forgot the link to the story, now at the top.