Von Spakovsky quickly moved up in the Justice Department, and by 2002 he was advising on cases and policy at the voting section of the civil rights division. There he found common cause with the Bush-appointed acting head of the division, Bradley Schlozman. What followed, Von Spakovsky said, was “a clash between folks like me who really believe that the Voting Rights Act needs to be applied in a race-neutral manner and the folks who had been there a long time who saw it, frankly, as a way of helping only minority voters, and in particular, helping one political party.”

In 2004, the new leadership assigned a case against the majority-black county of Noxubee, Miss., for “relentless voting-related racial discrimination” against white voters — the first case ever brought by the Justice Department on behalf of white voters. When some division lawyers chafed at the decision, Schlozman decided to try to quell the dissent by conducting an aggressive — and, an inspector general’s report later found, illegal — effort to hire like-minded attorneys and to marginalize or get rid of career attorneys the Bush team saw as too liberal. In emails, Schlozman boasted: “My tentative plan to is to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section” and to replace them with “right-thinking Americans.”

One of these was J. Christian Adams, who had endeared himself to conservatives by seeking the disbarment of Hillary Clinton’s brother Hugh Rodham for representing felons seeking pardons during his brother-in-law’s presidency. Another was John Tanner, a career Justice Department attorney who joked in an email with Schlozman that he liked his coffee “Mary Frances Berry-style — black and bitter,” referring to the Democrat who headed the United States Commission on Civil Rights under Bill Clinton. Still another was Chris Coates, a former A.C.L.U. lawyer who, Schlozman wrote, had become “a very different man” and was now “a true member of the team.” Not making the cut was a black lawyer who, Schlozman complained in an email, wrote in “ebonics” and, in his opinion, was hired as “an affirmative-action thing.”

It was in that toxic environment, in 2005, that Georgia submitted for approval a new type of strict voter-ID law. As it happened, the law comported with legislation Von Spakovsky described in a law-journal article he had recently published under a pen name, Publius. But a voting-division review team report — later leaked to The Washington Post — suggested that the department block the law. Black voters were considerably less likely to have any of the required IDs than whites were. According to the report, a prime sponsor of the bill, State Representative Sue Burmeister, told the review team that if the law diminished black voting, that was only because it shut down opportunities for fraud; black voters, the report paraphrased her as saying, were less likely to vote if they were not being paid to do so. A state judge ultimately invalidated the law, citing the plain language of the Georgia Constitution — “there is nothing equivocal about the words ‘shall be entitled to vote’ ” — and Georgia was forced to revise it. (The revised version provided free voter identification cards to those who needed them, and the Georgia Supreme Court upheld it.)

Still, when the Voting Rights Act went up for reauthorization in 2006, Von Spakovsky told me, he argued at the Justice Department that “the evidence very clearly showed it was no longer needed.” Blum, Clegg and Thernstrom made the same argument, on the Hill and with Karl Rove at the White House. But Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act for another 25 years, after it passed unanimously in the Senate and with only 33 “no” votes in the House. Signing the reauthorization that July, Bush declared, “My administration will vigorously enforce the provisions of this law, and we will defend it in court.”