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<BODY><FONT size=4><STRONG><FONT size=5>Politics Alleged In Voting
Cases<BR></FONT></STRONG>Justice Officials Are Accused of Influence<BR><BR><FONT
size=3>By Dan Eggen<BR>Washington Post Staff Writer<BR>Monday, January 23, 2006;
A01<BR><BR><BR><BR>The Justice Department's voting section, a small and usually
obscure unit that enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal election
laws, has been thrust into the center of a growing debate over recent departures
and controversial decisions in the Civil Rights Division as a whole.<BR><BR>Many
current and former lawyers in the section charge that senior officials have
exerted undue political influence in many of the sensitive voting-rights cases
the unit handles. Most of the department's major voting-related actions over the
past five years have been beneficial to the GOP, they say, including two in
Georgia, one in Mississippi and a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by Rep.
Tom DeLay (R) in 2003.<BR><BR>The section also has lost about a third of its
three dozen lawyers over the past nine months. Those who remain have been barred
from offering recommendations in major voting-rights cases and have little input
in the section's decisions on hiring and policy.<BR><BR>"If the Department of
Justice and the Civil Rights Division is viewed as political, there is no doubt
that credibility is lost," former voting-section chief Joe Rich said at a recent
panel discussion in Washington. He added: "The voting section is always subject
to political pressure and tension. But I never thought it would come to
this."<BR><BR>Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and his aides dispute such
criticism and defend the department's actions in voting cases. "We're not going
to politicize decisions within the department," he told reporters last month
after The Washington Post had disclosed staff memoranda recommending objections
to a Georgia voter-identification plan and to the Texas
redistricting.<BR><BR>The 2005 Georgia case has been particularly controversial
within the section. Staff members complain that higher-ranking Justice officials
ignored serious problems with data supplied by the state in approving the plan,
which would have required voters to carry photo identification.<BR><BR>Georgia
provided Justice with information on Aug. 26 suggesting that tens of thousands
of voters may not have driver's licenses or other identification required to
vote, according to officials and records. That added to the concerns of a team
of voting-section employees who had concluded that the Georgia plan would hurt
black voters.<BR><BR>But higher-ranking officials disagreed, and approved the
plan later that day. They said that as many as 200,000 of those without ID cards
were felons and illegal immigrants and that they would not be eligible to vote
anyway.<BR><BR>One of the officials involved in the decision was Hans von
Spakovsky, a former head of the Fulton County GOP in Atlanta, who had long
advocated a voter-identification law for the state and oversaw many voting
issues at Justice. Justice spokesman Eric W. Holland said von Spakovsky's
previous activities did not require a recusal and had no impact on his actions
in the Georgia case.<BR><BR>Holland denied a request to interview von Spakovsky,
saying that department policy "does not authorize the media to conduct
interviews with staff attorneys." Von Spakovsky has since been named to the
Federal Election Commission in a recess appointment by President Bush.<BR><BR>In
written answers to questions from The Post, Holland called allegations of
partisanship in the voting section "categorically untrue." He said the Bush
administration has approved the vast majority of the approximately 3,000
redistricting plans it has reviewed, including many drawn up by
Democrats.<BR><BR>Holland and other Justice officials also emphasize the Bush
administration's aggressive enforcement of laws requiring foreign-language
ballot information in districts where minorities make up a significant portion
of the population. Since 2001, the division has filed 14 lawsuits to provide
comprehensive language programs for minorities, including the first aimed at
Filipino and Vietnamese voters, he said.<BR><BR>"We have undertaken the most
vigorous enforcement of the language minority provisions of the Voting Rights
Act in its history," Holland said.<BR><BR>Some lawyers who have recently left
the Civil Rights Division, such as Rich at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil
Rights Under Law and William Yeomans at the American Constitution Society, have
taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing the way voting matters have been
handled. Other former and current employees have discussed the controversy on
the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.<BR><BR>These critics say
that the total number of redistricting cases approved under Bush means little
because the section has always cleared the vast majority of the hundreds of
plans it reviews every year.<BR><BR>The Bush administration has also initiated
relatively few cases under Section 2, the main anti-discrimination provision of
the Voting Rights Act, filing seven lawsuits over the past five years --
including the department's first reverse-discrimination complaint on behalf of
white voters. The only case involving black voters was begun under the previous
administration and formally filed by transitional leadership in early
2001.<BR><BR>By comparison, department records show, 14 Section 2 lawsuits were
filed during the last two years of Bill Clinton's presidency
alone.<BR><BR>Conflicts in the voting-rights arena at Justice are not new,
particularly during Republican administrations, when liberal-leaning career
lawyers often clash with more conservative political appointees, experts say.
The conflicts have been further exacerbated by recent court rulings that have
made it more difficult for Justice to challenge redistricting
plans.<BR><BR>William Bradford Reynolds, the civil rights chief during the
Reagan administration, opposed affirmative-action remedies and court-ordered
busing -- and regularly battled with career lawyers in the division as a result.
During the administration of George H.W. Bush, the division aggressively pushed
for the creation of districts that were more than 60 percent black in a strategy
designed to produce more solidly white and Republican districts in the
South.<BR><BR>These districts were widely credited with boosting the GOP in the
region during the 1994 elections.<BR><BR>Rich, who worked in the Civil Rights
Division for 37 years, said the conflicts in the current administration are more
severe than in earlier years. "I was there in the Reagan years, and this is
worse," he said.<BR><BR>But Michael A. Carvin, a civil rights deputy under
Reagan, said such allegations amount to "revisionist history." He contended that
the voting section has long tilted to the left politically.<BR><BR>Carvin and
other conservatives also say the opinions of career lawyers in the section
frequently have been at odds with the courts, including a special panel in Texas
that rejected challenges to the Republican-sponsored redistricting plan there.
The Supreme Court has since agreed to hear the case.<BR><BR>"The notion that
they are somehow neutral or somehow ideologically impartial is simply not
supported by the evidence," Carvin said. "It hasn't been the politicos that were
departing from the law or normal practice, but the voting-rights
section."<BR><BR>In Mississippi in 2002, Justice political appointees rejected a
recommendation from career lawyers to approve a redistricting plan favorable to
Democrats. While Justice delayed issuing a final decision, a panel of three GOP
federal judges approved a plan favorable to a Republican congressman.<BR><BR>The
division has also issued unusually detailed legal opinions favoring Republicans
in at least two states, contrary to what former staff members describe as a
dictum to avoid unnecessary involvement in partisan disputes. The practice ended
up embarrassing the department in Arizona in 2005, when Justice officials had to
rescind a letter that wrongly endorsed the legality of a GOP bill limiting
provisional ballots.<BR><BR>In Georgia, a federal judge eventually ruled against
the voter identification plan on constitutional grounds, likening it to a poll
tax from the Jim Crow era. The measure would have required voters to pay $20 for
a special card if they did not have photo identification; Georgia Republicans
are pushing ahead this year with a bill that does not charge a fee for the
card.<BR><BR>Holland called the data in the case "very straightforward," and
said it showed statistically that 100 percent of Georgians had identification
and that no racial disparities were evident.<BR><BR>But an Aug. 25 staff memo
that recommended opposing the plan disparaged the quality of the state's
information and said that only limited conclusions could be drawn from
it.<BR><BR>"They took all that data and willfully misread it," one source
familiar with the case said. "They were only looking for statistics that would
back up their view."<BR><BR>Mark Posner, a former longtime Civil Rights Division
lawyer who teaches election law at American University, noted that Justice could
have taken as many as 60 more days -- rather than seven hours -- to issue an
opinion because of the new data. <BR><BR></FONT><BR></FONT></BODY></HTML>