By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, for the October 29, 2012 issue

The man who has stoked the fear about impostors at the polls.

Excerpt:

[....] In 2006, President Bush appointed von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission while the Senate was in recess. When he came up for confirmation, six career lawyers in the voting section wrote a scathing letter of protest, saying that he had a “cavalier” disregard for legal precedent. They noted that a federal court had struck down Washington State’s attempt to implement his recommendation that eligible citizens be kept “off the rolls for typos and other mistakes by election officials.” They accused von Spakovsky of overruling their judgment that a strict voter-I.D. law in Georgia would result in substantially fewer black voters, and of using a pseudonym to publish an essay in support of voter-I.D. laws while the department was weighing the case. A judge in Georgia struck down the law, likening it to a poll tax. (After considerable modifications, the law was authorized.)

Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section, repeatedly clashed with von Spakovsky and his allies. “I worked at the Justice Department for thirty-six years, twenty-four of them under Republican Administrations,” Rich told me. “The disdain and antagonism that they had for the experience, expertise, and dedication of career civil-rights attorneys was something I had never experienced before. It was just awful.”

Among the lawmakers who spoke out against von Spakovsky’s appointment to the F.E.C. was Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois. He put a hold on the confirmation, effectively blocking it. After two years in limbo, von Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration, and joined the Heritage Foundation, where he continued to inveigh against voter fraud [....]