Hans von Spakovsky & Allison Riggs: 2 Opposing Views on NC Voting Laws

• Report rights infringement
• published: 19 Mar 2013
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On March 13, 2013, five experts in the field of voter ID legislation spoke in a hearing before North Carolina lawmakers, less than 24 hours after 70 people spoke out against upcoming legislation intended to require voters to show photo identification before voting (14 people spoke in favor of the law). The House Elections Committee says it wants to collect as much input as possible before drafting a voter ID bill, which Republican lawmakers are eager to pass. This video contains two of the five opening statements by Allison Riggs of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation. Allison Riggs, Staff Attorney, Voting Rights From: http://www.southerncoalition.org/ Allison Riggs is a staff attorney focusing on voting rights and environmental justice. She has been with SCSJ since 2009. Her voting rights work over the last two years has been focused on redistricting, and she has litigated redistricting cases on behalf of State NAACP Conferences in Texas, Florida and North Carolina. She has also been involved in defending the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. She received her undergraduate, Master's Degree and J.D. from the University of Florida. During law school, she was the student coordinator for the Restoration of Civil Rights Project--a student organization that provided assistance to applicants seeking to have the state of Florida restore to them their civil rights following a felony conviction. From Wikipedia: Hans Anatol von Spakovsky is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He was nominated to the FEC by President George W. Bush on December 15, 2005 and was appointed by recess appointment on January 4, 2006. However, von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by Senate Democrats, who argued that his oversight of voter laws was unacceptably partisan and that he had consistently acted to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Opposition to the nomination was bolstered by objections from career Justice Department staff, who accused von Spakovsky of politicizing his nominally non-partisan office to an unprecedented degree. Von Spakovsky's tenure at the Justice Department was marked by a focus on voter eligibility and voter fraud. In 2005, he led the Department's approval of a controversial Georgia law requiring voters to produce photo ID,[8] despite strong objections from Justice Department staff that the law would disproportionately harm and disenfranchise African-American voters.[7] Von Spakovksy subsequently acknowledged that he had written a law review article supporting such photo ID laws under the pseudonym "Publius", prompting concerns that he should have recused himself from the Justice Department decision.[9] The Georgia law was subsequently overturned by a federal judge, who compared it to a "Jim-Crow era poll tax".[9] During von Spakovsky's tenure, more than half of the career Justice Department staff left the voting section in protest. Von Spakovsky also served on the Board of Advisors of the Election Assistance Commission, a government commission created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. He clashed with the Commission head, Paul DeGregorio. Several individuals with knowledge of the situation, speaking anonymously to McClatchy Newspapers, alleged that DeGregorio had resisted an overtly partisan agenda and his removal was therefore engineered by von Spakovsky. Von Spakovsky received his recess appointment by President Bush to the FEC in January 2006. His confirmation hearings were contentious, as Democratic Senators criticized von Spakovsky's Justice Department tenure and accused him of partisanship. A group of career Justice Department staff wrote a letter to the Senate arguing against von Spakovsky's appointment, saying that he "played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and into the hiring process, and included repeated efforts to intimidate career staff." In response to questioning from the Senate, von Spakovsky repeatedly asserted that he could not remember or recall his involvement in various controversial Justice Department decisions, drawing comparisons to the testimony of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Faced with mounting opposition, von Spakovsky ultimately withdrew from the FEC confirmation process. He subsequently assumed a position with the Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative think tank.