Hans von Spakovsky

Hans Anatol von Spakovsky (born March 11, 1959) is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He is the manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an advocate for more restrictive voting laws. He has been described as playing an influential role in making unfounded concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party. He was nominated to the FEC by President George W. Bush on December 15, 2005, and was appointed by recess appointment on January 4, 2006. However, von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by Senate Democrats, who argued that his oversight of voter laws was unacceptably partisan. Opposition to the nomination was bolstered by objections from career Justice Department staff, who accused von Spakovsky of politicizing his nominally non-partisan office to an unprecedented degree. While von Spakovsky and the Bush Administration denied the accusations of partisanship, the nomination was withdrawn on May 15, 2008. Von Spakovsky subsequently joined the staff of The Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative think tank. On June 29, 2017, President Donald Trump named him to be a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Early life and education Von Spakovsky was born in Huntsville, Alabama, where his parents had eventually settled after immigrating to the United States in 1951. His German mother met his Russian father Anatoly von Spakovsky, a White émigré who had settled in Yugoslavia after WWI and then fled to Germany after WWII, in a German refugee camp for displaced persons. Von Spakovsky graduated from Grissom High in 1977, received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, and a J.D. from the Vanderbilt University Law School in 1984. Von Spakovsky is a member of the Georgia and Tennessee bars.