# Hans von Spakovsky **Hans von Spakovsky** (b. March 11, 1959, Huntsville, Alabama) has spent two decades as the conservative movement's leading "election integrity" lawyer. He supplied the legal theory, the data and the government service behind voter-ID laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements and aggressive voter-roll purges, all framed as fighting voter fraud. In the vault he is the movement's premier voter-fraud-myth intellectual. Since January 2026 he has worked at Mike Pence's **Advancing American Freedom** rather than at the [[Heritage Foundation]]. ## In government - **Justice Department, 2001–2005.** As counsel in the Civil Rights Division's voting section, he helped push through approval of **Georgia's 2005 photo-ID law** over the objections of career staff. That law became an early model for the voter-ID wave. - **Federal Election Commission, 2006–2007.** Bush gave him a recess appointment in January 2006. Senate Democrats blocked confirmation over his DOJ record, and the nomination was withdrawn in May 2008. - **The Kobach commission, 2017.** He served on Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by [[Mike Pence]] and run by [[Kris Kobach]]. Before it formed, he emailed the Justice Department urging that Democrats be kept off it, warning that including them would "guarantee its failure." The commission found no evidence of mass fraud and was **disbanded in January 2018**. ## At Heritage As senior legal fellow and head of Heritage's Election Law Reform Initiative, he built its **Election Fraud Database**. It is a list of individual cases that critics note amounts to a vanishingly small fraction of votes cast, but it functions as rhetorical proof that fraud exists. His books are *Who's Counting?* (2012, with John Fund), *Obama's Enforcer* (2014) and *Our Broken Elections* (2021). He wrote the Federal Election Commission chapter of [[Project 2025]], and he sits on the board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which sues states over their voter rolls. His policy line runs straight into the 2025–26 citizenship-verification agenda: the [[SAVE Act]], Trump's proof-of-citizenship orders, and the [[Honest Elections Project]] and [[America First Legal]] petitions. ## The Heritage exodus In October 2025, Heritage president [[Kevin Roberts]] posted a video defending [[Tucker Carlson]], which set off a wave of departures from the think tank. Von Spakovsky was among those who left. On **Jan 12, 2026**, Advancing American Freedom announced he was joining it alongside John Malcolm, at AAF's new **Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law**. His move does not represent a change in ideas. It shows the movement's institutional map shifting, with the Reagan-era legal establishment, the [[Edwin Meese]] lineage, moving from Heritage to Pence's organization. ## See Also - [[Heritage Foundation]] · [[Kevin Roberts]] · [[Mike Pence]] · [[Edwin Meese]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[SAVE Act]] · [[Honest Elections Project]] · [[America First Legal]] · [[Kris Kobach]] · [[Project 2025]]