When Phyllis Schlafly Met Hans Von Spakovsky

by digby

A reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch attended the Von Spakovsky vote stealing seminar yesterday:

Last evening, the subject was election fraud, the locale was Cardwell’s Restaurant in Clayton, the convener was the St. Louis Chapter of the Federalist Society, the atmosphere was convivial, and the talk was … well … fierce.

Featured guests, billed as an All Star Panel on Contemporary Election Law Issues, were big time GOP operative Randy Evans of Georgia, as well as Asheesh Agarwal and Hans Von Spakovsky, both of whom were senior lawyers in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during a time of controversy over the enforcement of Federal voters rights laws.

All are in town for a sold out election law seminar sponsored by the Republican National Lawyers Association. It will be held in Clayton, Friday and Saturday.

I was invited to cover last night’s program by the Federalist Society, and was welcomed by local chapter president and attorney Jennifer Wolsing and her colleagues.

On hand were two long tables of Federalist Society members and friends, including that icon of the American political scene, Phyllis Schlafly.

The panelists covered a wide range of hot button elections issues. They made a lot of claims about the current electoral system being fraught with, or at serious risk of, widespread voter fraud. I am skeptical about many of these claims — but require more time to consider and evaluate what the panelists had to say.

Which I will do and follow up with a Part 2 to this post.

Also I wondered why no mention was made about the still unresolved scandal involving politicization of federal prosecutors over election law matters, including the apparent firings of U.S. Attorneys for refusing to bring what they thought were unmeritorious voter fraud cases.

It’s hard to see how any serious discussion about the integrity of the system could ignore that development.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of items of interest. Click on the link below to hear Mr. Agarwal’s analysis of a recent Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in a case brought by the Justice Department over the state of Missouri’s voter registration rolls:

read on to listen to MP3s of the discussion, including one very odd comment from Von Spakovsky.


They may not have felt comfortable about talking about the US Attorney purge because, as Murray Waas reported yesterday, there is rumbling that a special prosecutor may be named in the probe. Loose lips sink ships...

As I wrote yesterday, this election is going to have special challenges because Democrats have registered so many new voters, which means they are people who don't know how the system works, especially young people, and there will be a lot of opportunity for vote suppression and intimidation, not to mention casting doubt on the results. Democrats couldn't make vote suppression charges stick over the past eight years, but the right has a much more sophisticated understanding of how to create and then flog such controversies to make it difficult for a Democrat to govern. All those years of complaining about what went wrong in Florida and Ohio are going to look like child's play when these guys take that meme and run with it.



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