At a US House hearing in May, a bespectacled 65-year-old attorney made a startling claim: American citizens’ right to vote was under attack. Non-citizens, Hans von Spakovsky claimed, were voting unchecked in federal elections, and something needed to be done about it.
“We know that aliens are registering and actually voting,” said von Spakovsky, “and it’s important to understand that every vote by an alien voids the vote of a citizen.”
For von Spakovsky, who leads Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative and authored the section of Project 2025 on federal election oversight, the testimony joined two of his favorite topics: immigration and what he believes is the unseen scourge of fraudulent voting in American elections.
It was also deeply misleading. The criminal penalties for voting in federal elections are steep for immigrants without full citizenship – felony charges and even deportation. So they rarely cast ballots in US elections. That has not stopped von Spakovsky from doubling down on his claim that non-citizen voting threatens election security.
Anxieties about voter fraud entered the conservative mainstream in full force in the mid-2000s, as Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country adopted voter identification laws ostensibly to prevent individual acts of fraudulent voting – like a voter casting a ballot in two states or under someone else’s name. The idea that elections could be vulnerable to widespread fraud formed the basis of Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen – captivating his base and driving thousands to insurrectionist violence on 6 January 2021.
Von Spakovsky, who former colleagues describe as mild-mannered and even awkward, did not join Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election; nor did he join the former president’s loyalists who publicly decried the results of the election as illegitimate.
But von Spakovsky has nonetheless been working tirelessly, often behind the scenes, to raise unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud throughout the course of his decades-long career as a conservative activist. “Election integrity” and the idea that US elections are vulnerable to mass, fraudulent voting, has become a centerpiece of conservative politics, with von Spakovsky playing a key role in bringing the movement to that point.
“He probably is the single most important advocate, over a long period of time, persuading people to take this claim of fraud seriously,” said Paul Smith, the senior vice-president of the non-partisan voting rights group Campaign Legal Center.
Von Spakovsky did not respond to numerous requests for an interview.
Von Spakovsky got his first serious exposure to elections administration when he was nominated to the Fulton county, Georgia board of registration and elections by the county Republican party in 1996, when he was working as an attorney in the private sector.
Wini Cox, a Democrat who served on the board with him, described von Spakovsky as hyper-vigilant and intensely wary of the voting process.
“Hans was suspicious of everything,” said Cox.
By 2000, von Spakovsky had made a name for himself in a small network of conservative organizations dedicated to voter fraud and elections security. In a lengthy blog post on the Federalist Society’s website in February 2000, he mused about mail-in voting, permanent absentee voting and the spectre of non-US citizens registering to vote. Especially concerning, wrote von Spakovsky, were voting reforms that streamlined the voter registration process – like the National Voter Registration Act, which made it easier for voters to register while applying for a drivers license.
“All of these ‘reforms’ have increased the opportunity for election fraud,” he wrote.
Voter Integrity Project, a Virginia-based organization that von Spakovsky advised, advocated purging voter rolls, even awarding the company responsible for erroneously scrubbing thousands of disproportionately minority voters from Florida’s rolls before the 2000 election, an honor for “innovation”.
Later, when George W Bush was elected president, von Spakovsky – at that point a prominent blogger and activist focused on the topic of voter fraud – was hired to the voting section of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice; in 2002, he was promoted to oversee the section. Brought in with the new presidential administration, von Spakovsky was in all but name a political appointee. But he served alongside career staffers in the department.
“He was technically in a career position,” said Jon Greenbaum, who served as a trial attorney in the voting section at the time. “But in practical terms, he was playing a very political role.”
In a particularly striking incident, von Spakovsky declined to recuse himself from reviewing the legality of a strict voter identification law in Georgia, despite having recently worked there as a Republican party activist. While the review was underway, von Spakovsky even published an article advocating for voter ID laws under the pseudonym “Publius.” Over the objections of career attorneys, who in a memo argued that “the totality of the evidence” suggested the law would disproportionately disenfranchise Black voters, “higher ranking officials” allowed the law to be cleared, according to the Washington Post.
In 2005, von Spakovsky was rewarded for his performance in the Department of Justice – with an interim appointment, by Bush, to the Federal Elections Commission, where he worked for two years.
But the Senate never confirmed his appointment. Six former justice department staff made the unprecedented decision to pen a letter to the committee on rules and administration objecting to his full appointment.
During his tenure in the voting section, they alleged, von Spakovsky had “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”.
It would not be the last time that people who encountered him professionally would find themselves so alarmed by his cutthroat partisanship.
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Three years after von Spakovsky withdrew from consideration for the FEC appointment, he returned again to elections administration – as vice-chair of the three-person electoral board in Fairfax county, a blue-leaning Virginia county outside DC with a large immigrant population. César del Aguila, who chaired the county Democratic party at the time, said that during his tenure on the board, von Spakovsky objected to the placement of non-English language informational materials about voting in polling places.
“Why is it okay to remove literature in different languages?” said del Aguila. “To me, it was a very personal thing that was happening there, targeting the majority-minority immigrant community.”
When von Spakovsky was up for re-appointment, del Aguila felt he needed to do something. In a letter to the circuit court overseeing von Spakovsky’s re-appointment, del Aguila wrote on behalf of the county Democratic party that von Spakovsky was “temperamentally ill-suited” to carry out his responsibilities on the elections board.
“I had a lot of institutional conservative Democrats give me crap about writing that, and taking that position, because [to them] it was more important to just not make any waves,” said del Aguila. “It probably would not have been done had not a Latino been chair.”
The court was receptive, and declined to reappoint von Spakovsky.
For decades, von Spakovsky had been writing about and advocating for the implementation of strict voter identification laws and dismissing the justified concern such measures would disenfranchise poor and minority voters as “hysterical”. In 2018, he got a chance to prove in court his position that election integrity requires strict voter identification laws.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was suing the Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach over a law requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship before casting a ballot. The plaintiffs argued the law violated the National Voter Registration Act; von Spakovsky, a friend of Kobach’s in the fight for voter ID, would stand as an expert witness in defense of the strict law.
The testimony went terribly.
During his statement before the court, von Spakovsky pointed to coverage from a Florida NBC outlet that had found a possible 100 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls.
During cross-examination, Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, pointed out that the NBC outlet had revised their reporting, finding that at least 35 of the 100 voters originally identified as ineligible were actually US citizens. Von Spakovsky conceded that this was true. Ho also pointed to an article that von Spakovsky had written in 2011 claiming a Missouri election had hinged on illegal votes cast by Somali residents. It hadn’t, Ho revealed: before von Spakovsky’s article ran, a judge had found no fraud had taken place during the election.
Julie Robinson, the US district judge overseeing the case, ultimately sided with the ACLU. In her opinion, she issued a devastating indictment of von Spakovsky and his evidence. The court, she wrote, gave “little weight” to von Spakovsky’s testimony, which was “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples of noncitizen voter registration, mostly outside the state of Kansas”. Von Spakovsky had given the impression of an activist masquerading as an expert.
“He really got himself into trouble with the judge,” said Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist who wrote the book The Myth of Voter Fraud and served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs during the Kansas case. “That hasn’t chastened him at all – he’s been steadfast.”
Despite having been discredited in court, von Spakovsky continued to work as a proponent of so-called “election integrity” efforts, led the Election Law Reform Initiative at the rightwing Heritage Foundation and joined Trump’s short-lived Presidential Advisory commission on Election Integrity in 2017.
At the foundation, von Spakovsky wields considerable influence.
“I would sit here and talk to him for seven or eight hours,” said Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, in a 2022 podcast interview with von Spakovsky. “In fact, we do that some months over the period of several meetings.”
At the foundation, von Spakovsky fires off a regular stream of written commentary on elections – but also on other conservative topics du jour. In one column, he argues in support of Texas’s razored buoys in the Rio Grande river. In another, he decries the NFL as “an anti-American, ‘woke’ institution” for playing Lift Every Voice and Sing, at football games.
He has also continued to work closely with Republican election officials; in 2020, ProPublica reported that von Spakovsky had held a series of closed-door meetings with election officials examining the issue of voter fraud. In the years since, he has continued to work with Republican secretaries of state.
In a six-page article published in the Heritage Foundation’s now-infamous Project 2025, von Spakovsky offers a glimpse of his vision for a future for US elections regulation – in which the Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with overseeing campaign finance laws and US federal elections, is brought to heel.
Currently overseen by a commission of three Democratic and three Republican appointees, the FEC has regularly deadlocked over major issues. One proposal, backed by some Democrats, would reduce the size of the FEC to five appointees with a nonpartisan chair.
The president, von Spakovsky argues, “should vigorously oppose” such a reform.
The FEC’s most grievous fault, he adds, is not under-enforcement, as pro-democracy groups argue, but over-enforcement. The document contains echoes of von Spakovsky’s years in the justice department – where he served during a time of hyper-partisanship.
In von Spakovsky’s view, the enforcement of US elections law should be under the purview of one person: the president.
“The President should direct the DOJ and the attorney general not to prosecute individuals under an interpretation of the law with which the FEC,” von Spakovsky writes, “does not agree.”
His view aligns closely with the bulk of Project 2025 – a playbook for a Republican presidency that would radically consolidate the power of the executive branch, prioritizing not only deregulation, long a pillar of the conservative movement, but also a draconian crackdown on immigration and immigrants living in the US without documentation.
“The reaction of the left” to Project 2025, von Spakovsky laughed during an 8 July podcast “is really telling.”
