type: timeline_event
Hans von Spakovsky joined the Heritage Foundation in 2008 as manager of the Civil Justice Reform Initiative, a position that would evolve into leadership of Heritage's Election Law Reform Initiative. Voting rights advocates would later characterize him as "the intellectual godfather of the conservative anti-voting movement." Von Spakovsky brought direct experience from his 2002-2005 tenure at the DOJ Civil Rights Division, where he overruled career attorneys to approve voter suppression laws including Georgia's photo ID legislation, and from his 2006-2007 recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission. His Heritage position institutionalized voter suppression as a central conservative policy priority.
At Heritage, von Spakovsky managed the Election Fraud database — which critics said vastly overstated the prevalence of in-person voter fraud — and produced research and legal arguments justifying restrictive voting laws. His work coordinated closely with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which approved a model "Voter ID Act" in 2009 based substantially on von Spakovsky's frameworks. Following Barack Obama's 2008 election, which demonstrated the power of expanded minority voter turnout, Heritage and ALEC rapidly deployed this infrastructure. By 2011, approximately 34 states introduced nearly identical voter ID bills based on the ALEC model.
Von Spakovsky also served as a prominent media spokesperson for voter suppression initiatives, lending Heritage's think-tank credibility to what critics described as partisan advocacy for policies that disproportionately benefited Republican electoral prospects. His infrastructure-building at Heritage proved consequential: when President Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017, von Spakovsky was a key member, and when Heritage Action launched a $24 million voter suppression campaign in 2021 targeting eight states, it built directly on the organizational foundation von Spakovsky had established.