http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012200984_pf.html
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 23, 2006; A01
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We have undertaken the most vigorous enforcement of
the language minority provisions of the Voting Rights Act in its history,"
Holland said.
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.
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.
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.
By comparison, department records show, 14 Section 2
lawsuits were filed during the last two years of Bill Clinton's presidency
alone.
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.
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.
These districts were widely credited with boosting the GOP
in the region during the 1994 elections.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Staff writer Thomas B. Edsall and researcher Julie Tate
contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company