When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office.

—Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—The entire Charlatans Cotillion that took place on the campus of St. Anselm’s College on Tuesday ended with a barefaced obvious lie from a barefaced obvious liar, which is entirely in keeping with the hearing held here by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, a body that is nearly as nauseating as it is ridiculous.

While the hearing was going on, the Campaign Legal Center released a copy of an internal Heritage Foundation email that it had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It was addressed to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The name of the sender was blacked out, but the content of the email took the committee’s entire threadbare claim to any legitimacy at all and fed bloody gobbets of that claim to the wolverines. The email said, in part:

There isn’t a single Democratic official who will do anything other than obstruct any investigation of voter fraud and issue constant public announcements criticizing the commission… If they are picking mainstream Republican officials and/or academics to man this commission then it will be an abject failure because there aren’t any that know anything about this or who have paid any attention to this issue over the years.

Protesters gather on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017, at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., ahead of a day-long meeting of the Trump administration’s election integrity commission. AP

So no Democrats and no “mainstream Republicans,” whoever they are. And, god help us, no “academics.” Keep them far away from the landfill the commission calls its research. However, one of the commissioners is a Heritage employee named Hans von Spakovsky, and we will get to him in due course. But once word of the email got around the hearing room, as the only representative of Heritage in the room, reporters naturally flocked to von Spakovsky at the end of the hearing for comment. Jessica Huseman of ProPublica got there first and asked him if he had written the email in question or if he knew who did. Von Spakovsky replied:



I have no idea.

She asked him if he’d written the email.

Not that I recall.

Did he have any comment at all?

I didn’t know anything about it.

This bouquet of fragrant stable droppings held up for approximately 90 minutes, at which point Heritage spokesperson Sarah Mills issued the following statement.



The Heritage Foundation is scrupulously nonpartisan.

(Sorry, the sheer audacity of that statement got caught in my throat for a minute.)

Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and has managed our Election Law Reform Initiative for many years. He brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the discussion of voter fraud, and holds strong views on the topic. The views expressed in the email are his own.

Yeah, the day ended with a lie from Hans von Spakovsky that was so easily debunked that it was an insult to all sentient beings everywhere.

Which was pitch perfect.

Once, long ago, when I was just starting out at the Boston Phoenix, I covered a trial for about a month. There was this state senator. And there was this friendly guy who could only be called his bagman. Everybody at the State House knew what was what with these two. Then, as a sidelight to a massive corruption scandal that pretty much decapitated the legislative leadership in both parties, they brought the senator to trial based on his relationship to his bagman. But, for arcane legal reasons, they charged the senator with extortion.

Hans von Spakovsky Getty Images

This was the silliest thing anyone ever heard. It was like charging your children with extorting candy from the Easter Bunny. But that was what went to trial. The prosecutors tore up the language and the law trying to prove that the senator was knuckling the guy who was eagerly purchasing his influence with both hands. The testimony got increasingly surreal. The senator walked, at least on those charges. I thought that was the most absurd event I’d ever sit through, and it remained so until Tuesday, when I dropped by the public hearing of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity.



(“Public hearing” is, of course, a misnomer. There was no public-comment period here. All that was public about this public hearing was the fact that they didn’t hold it in a root cellar.)

This, of course, is the commission led by vice chairman Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, a guy who’s based his entire political career on knuckling immigrants and inventing tales of voter fraud, even as he keeps getting swatted upside his head in various courts. The commission is larded with people like Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams and Ken Blackwell, all of whom have been enthusiastic pitchmen for the voter-fraud mythology ever since they slimed into the public eye. What we got on Tuesday was a visit to a fantastical world so detached from actual reality that the Hubble couldn’t pick it up, a universe of non-fact and ideological incest so round and complete that it was like wandering into something from Gulliver's Travels.

What we got on Tuesday was a visit to a fantastical world so detached from actual reality that the Hubble couldn’t pick it up.

For example, von Spakovsky spent the morning session as a member of the commission. He spent the afternoon session as a witness. In the latter capacity, he at one point cited a study done by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the president of which was…J. Christian Adams, his fellow commission member who was at that moment sitting six feet away from witness von Spakovsky up on the platform on which commission member von Spakovsky would soon rejoin him. The Waltons weren’t this close.

In truth, the presence of these two on the commission was the most obvious tell of them all. In truth, this commission really was born 11 years ago, when Karl Rove and the White House political operation embarked on an effort to corrupt the Department of Justice over the very phantom issue on which this commission presently is burning through taxpayer money. In December of 2006, the Bush DOJ abruptly fired seven U.S. Attorneys, an unprecedented move, especially in the middle of their terms. At least in part, some of these prosecutors were canned because they refused to chase phony “voter fraud” cases down the rabbit hole the way the White House wanted them to.

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, attend a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 in Manchester, NH. AP

At the same time, the Bush administration sought to politicize the DOJ’s Civil Rights division—and, in particular, its Voting Section—in pretty much the same way and for pretty much the same reasons. The point man on this was a guy named Bradley Schlozman, a real sweetheart who once was quoted as saying:

“I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys. My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs rights out of the section.”

Von Spakovsky was the button man Schlozman sent into the Voting Section. Within two years, 55 percent of the lawyers in that section had left the government. Adams also worked in that now utterly corrupt Justice Department, and so did Robert Popper, who now works for Judicial Watch, the famous wingnut nuisance suit factory, but who once joined the Bush DOJ’s Voting Section at the height of the frenzy of politicization and who also appeared before his old colleagues as a friendly witness on Tuesday. This was the Big Bang that created the mendacious universe in which Kobach ran his hearing.

Kobach came ashore in this universe slightly later than the others did, but he came in greeted as a native. In fact, when Kobach ran for the position he now holds, von Spakovsky wrote fundraising letters for him. From The Kansan:



“The secretary of state posts are too often neglected by Republicans,” Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer who once handled election issues for former President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, said in an e-mail promoting an October fundraiser for Kobach in Washington.

The whole thing took place on a deserted intellectual island built from phony statistics and dark money. The witness list was proof enough of that. In addition to the specimens previously identified, there was Ken Block, a software company president who, last July, published a report stating that almost 8,500 people had voted twice. This report was financed by the Government Accountability Institute, the operation founded by Steve Bannon, last heir to House Harkonnen, with money he got from the Mercers. The GAI was the outfit behind Clinton Cash, the Peter Schweitzer hit job over which both The New York Times and The Washington Post disgraced themselves and which also kick-started the stubborn meme that Hillary Rodham Clinton was personally corrupt because something, something, emails.

The whole thing took place on a deserted intellectual island of phony statistics and dark money.

Also on hand was John Lott, the famous gun-rights faker and legendary onetime sock puppet whose latest brainstorm is to use the National Instant Criminal Background Check—the mechanism by which background checks on gun purchases are conducted—to check voter registrations. His argument for this can be fairly summed up as, “Hey, Democrats. You love background checks for guns, so much why don’t you marry them?” I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly.

Jeff Sessions Getty Images

And then, just last week, in the run-up to this hearing, Kobach himself took to the Breitbart pixels to claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that some 5,000 voters had come to New Hampshire from out of state to vote during the 2016 elections, a charge based on the fact that people voted without owning New Hampshire driver’s licenses. This utter fantasy has been debunked with regularity ever since the president* was bellyaching about it in the aftermath of last year’s election. That touched off a genuine squabble at the start of the afternoon session, when Matt Dunlap, the Secretary of State from Maine, decided in his own quiet, polite way that things had gone far enough.



And they showed, with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into a man, was a perpetual clog to public business.



—Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

In truth, it’s a wonder Dunlap was able to keep still as long as he did. The first afternoon panel, which included von Spakovsky as a witness, as well as his old running buddy Popper from Judicial Watch and Block, the Mercer-funded hired gun, was such an exact mixture of fake piety and outright mendacity that it could put the Ipecac people out of business.

For example, Popper kept trying to convince us that these jamokes had the best interests of the National Voter Registration Act—the “motor voter” law of 1993—at heart when it is plain that one of the missions of this committee is to chloroform that law as covertly as possible. And then there was von Spakovsky, who maintained with a straight face that his life’s work has been to protect the integrity of the franchise for people of all races. “The people who are most victimized are the African-Americans who are poor and they become the targets,” said von Spakovsky, whose tongue did not turn to fire instantly, thereby proving that God is slowing down in His old age.

Getty Images

But then he truly gilded the hemlock by citing in defense of this proposition a vague account of voter-fraud convictions arising from a case in Greene County, Alabama, in 1985. Leaving aside the fact that he’s supporting his argument in 2017 with an example from 32 years ago, von Spakovsky seems also to be citing a case that was so egregiously biased on racial grounds that it cost Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III a federal judgeship and damned near cost him the nomination to the job he now holds. So much of the fauna on this deserted island relies on the tattered short-term memory of the people in the rest of the country.

But, still, it was Kobach who really stirred the pot. He began this session by trying to defend his Breitbart piece, largely by restating all of the disproved driver’s license nonsense in it, but by restating it with the mien of a basset hound severely defeated by life. He really struggled, he said, fitting all his evidence “into an 800-word column,” and with his choice of wording as to the fact that his phantom voter-fraudsters “appeared” to actually exist. (Kobach is remarkably inept at making his case; von Spakovsky is a much smoother prevaricator.) Bill Gardner, who’s been New Hampshire’s secretary of state since God was a boy, was a bit reticent, but was quite firm in telling Kobach that he was full of it and that he had some considerable nerve coming to New Hampshire and telling that state that their election laws were shoddy.

“The Supreme Court decision that Secretary Kobach is talking about actually said that someone could be ‘domiciled’ and could be a non-resident,” Gardner said. “After that decision, there were headlines across the state that you no longer need to be a resident to vote. The court also said that the linkage to drivers' licenses, if you are domiciled, you do not have to be resident, then that driver’s license issue is not an issue. The problems that have occurred because of what you wrote is that the question is whether our election as we have recorded it is real and valid. And it is real and valid.” Significantly, this drew the first and only applause of the day. Then it was Dunlap’s turn.



“In Maine, we approach this problem in a less connected way,” he said. “There are ways to establish residency and, as I mentioned, there are a number of definitions in Maine for a residence depending on the public purpose. When it comes to voting, it’s sort of a matter of where’s your pillow? Where do plan to return to after being temporarily away? That is your domicile.

Karl Rove Getty Images

“It’s easy to pick on the college students. We had a circumstance this past fall, and I did my best to intervene publicly, where someone put flyers on windshields of cars in parking lots around Bates College explaining that, if you are establishing residency by registering to vote and you’re an out of state student, then there’s an expectation that you’re going to update your driver’s license, that you’re going to register your vehicle, that you’re going to pay your excise tax, etc. etc. The idea was to scare these kids into not participating. It got worse at the University of Maine. An email went out to out-of-state students that said, if you register to vote, you are sacrificing your financial aid. I jumped into the breach on that and I think we were able to convince enough people that the democratic sovereign form of self-government actually does belong to American citizens.”

There was some serious shifting in chairs when Dunlap said this. Actual voter suppression of that sort is not what these people have been tasked to investigate, since their mandate is to devise subtler means of keeping the wrong sort of people from voting. Someone had washed up on the shores of the island and scared the resident Yahoos.

Their mandate is to devise subtler means of keeping the wrong sort of people from voting.

In truth, and despite the fact that its governor is human bowling jacket Paul LePage, Maine has been at the forefront of actual election reform, and not the camouflaged ratfcking practiced by the likes of Hans von Spakovsky, either. The Maine legislature even passed a law requiring ranked-choice voting that, so far, has survived court challenges and that is supposed to take effect by the 2018 midterms, but, Dunlap admits, likely will not be ready until the 2020 elections, if then. Dunlap has a very Maine way of explaining what his state has been up to in this regard.

“The reality is there is some value in stating what I believe is the obvious,” Dunlap said after the hearing had adjourned and Hans von Spakovsky had finished telling his fibs up in the front of the room. “Do you start with everything you have to do to be a voter or do you start with the fact that you’re an American citizen and you have a right to vote and then work backwards from there? This whole criminal element, there’s the prevention piece and then there’s the prosecution piece.

“We had a piece of legislation when I was on the Fish and Wildlife Commission that was brought to us by a dentist. He had gotten drawn to the moose hunt in Maine. He had done his due diligence, found his place, scouted it out, and found a big bull. They tend to hang in an area when they’re in the rut. And he’s working the trail and he hears this buzzing and it’s driving him crazy. He realizes it’s this plane, circling around. It didn’t take him long to figure out that it was a spotter plane, directing a group of hunters to the exact same moose he was tracking.

“He did get to the moose first and he put a tag on it. He thought, that’s not fair. It’s not a fair chase. He brought it to us and we agreed but one of the questions that came up in the work session was how are you going to enforce this? People were envisioning having a couple of warden pilots hovering around. If you’re going to prevent this from happening then you have this broad scenario where you have a no-fly zone over this moose. It’s a little bit of overreach. And I think that some of the discussions of how do you prevent voter fraud, well, you know, nothing happens in elections in real time. Only twice in the time I’ve been in office have we sent something to the attorney general and both times, they were just mistakes. We have tried to keep a balance between access to the ballot and the security of the ballot.”

And thus is born the perfect ending metaphor for a day on the strange, deserted island where most of these people have dwelled their entire career, a day of egregious posturing and the pursuit of the phantoms they have created for themselves and for the rest of us. Kris Kobach and the rest of them are laboring hard to create a no-fly zone over an imaginary moose.

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