For John, BLUF: Wherever you go, there is politics. Nothing to see here; just move along.
A little spat at the Fairfax County (Virginia) Election Board. Democrats object to re-appointment of Mr Hans A von Spakovsky. The line to The Washington Post from the Fairfax County Democratic Committee Chairman:
I’ve read about his background. I’m concerned why and how he ended up in Fairfax County in his role.I wonder if the County Democratic Chairman thinks of Mr von Spakovsky as a "blow in"?
Hat tip to the Instapundit.
Regards — Cliff
2 comments:
Effective illustration of partisan party loyalty trumping national, state and civic loyalty. If only it wasn't a bipartisan pastime...
Rules that entrench party affiliation as a litmus test for public service, as they do here in Lowell on boards such as the License Commission, are reactionary and need to be rewritten. Rules should be amended to simply disallow individual parties from achieving and exploiting a majority position. Beyond that, no barrier to service should be raised, nor should parties have any further say in the makeup of any public body. We need to return the government to We, the People. Not We the insert-party-name-here.
That someone might object to him isn't news, even if you think the objection is partisan.
The news here is that the judge acted. The assumption is that the judge acted in reaction to the objections, but that hasn't actually been established AFIK.
The PJ article makes it sound like the County's Democratic Committee was the only objection. Actually they received a lot of objections from a lot of parties - including other non-partisan election law experts.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2007/09/do_not_vote_for_this_guy.html
"Von Spakovsky's Senate confirmation hearing last June was noteworthy for many oddities, not the least of which was a letter sent to the rules committee by six former career professionals in the voting rights section of the Justice Department; folks who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations for a period that spanned 36 years. The letter urged the committee to reject von Spakovsky on the grounds that while at DoJ, he was one of the architects of a transformation in the voting rights section from its "historic mission to enforce the nation's civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section." The authors named him as the "point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division's mandate to protect voting rights."
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