Harry Reid had made a deal, he thought, to let a partisan Republican lawyer from DoJ's civil rights group, Hans von Spakovsky, get a vote on his nomination by Bush to the FEC – in a "package deal" that would let 3 others be voted on too.
von Spakovsky is one of the most repugnant of Bush's nominees to a position to monitor electioneering, 1 of the most influential of folks to jumpstart an outright purge of the voter rolls, beginning in Florida 2000.
Politico and Roll Call report Obama wouldn't let it through.
Sen. Obama put a hold on Bush's nominee.
What's so wrong with Hans von Spakovsky lording over US elections?
von Spakovsky at DoJ decimated voting rights of minorities --- and Hans was the brainchild behind the "Voting Integrity Project" database in Florida in 2000 that purged 1000s of blacks from the voter rolls by erroneously tagging innocents as felons.
Former colleagues, 6 from DoJ's Civil Rights division, wrote Congress to protest von Spakovsky's meddling to disenfranchise voters. They wrote he is "the point man for undermining the Civil Rights' Division's mandate to protect voting rights." The full objections of the DoJ civil rights alum, seen here.
Obama says he is an "unacceptable nominee." von Spakovsky has proved he is anything but impartial in administering voting rights.
Hans von Spakovsky is not the right person for the job, and I call on President Bush to send Congress a new nominee.
Hans conveniently told the senators "I can't remember" when queried about his intervention in key voter rights cases.
If you can't remember, let me remind you. He pioneered the so-called "voter integrity" movement to actively purge voter rolls. When implemented in Florida in 2000, the database purge removed innocents from the voter rolls, because the persons names nearly matched up (spelling errors allowed, a very generous match) and by last name and by race. Greg Palast covered it in the chapter "McKinney nails the confession" (of database matching company ChoicePoint). Tens of thousands of non-criminals were removed from the rolls and prevented from voting that year.
Voter purge restrictions suggested the remark, again by Palast, that Florida's governor at the time Jeb Bush and his enablers had a method to their matching scheme: "It's not that he doesn't like black people, he just doesn't like the color of their vote." (NPR audio interview)
So true. Republicans win elections by paring the voter rolls to tamp down the formidable alliance of moderate and liberal white persons, blacks and Latinos.
Abetting their goal are the database companies that administer the voter rolls, Unisys, Covansys/CBSI, ES&S, Diebold/DIMS, PCC Technology, Saber Consulting, and Accenture. The database firms are top-down committed (in $ contributions) to the Republican party, as I diaried in 2005. link
[Note - links will work better from an archived copy of it]
You can search out Obama's objections to the nominee here [The Louisiana Weekly - Bush's FEC nominee undermined voting rights].
Obama is right. This is the place to stop partisan handling of elections. This man cannot be rewarded and waved through.