Justice Dept. shifts on voting, deportation

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By Ben Conery

The Obama Justice Department broke with two Bush-era approaches to citizenship and immigration this week, rejecting a Georgia system to verify the eligibility of voters on grounds that it hurt minorities and expanding the right of illegal immigrants to appeal their deportations.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. reversed an order by his predecessor, Michael B. Mukasey, and bolstered the legal rights of immigrants facing deportation, saying that immigrants can fight orders to leave the U.S. on the grounds of poor legal representation at their deportation hearings.

That decision was announced two days after the Justice Department banned Georgia from using a system to verify that voter registrants are U.S. citizens, saying it discriminated against racial minorities. In doing so, the Justice Department overruled a local election decision for just the second time since Mr. Obama took office, in this case by ruling on the side of those who want to expand voter access and against Georgia lawmakers who said voter fraud was the bigger danger.

"I just think it is an outrageously stupid decision," Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former career Justice Department lawyer who worked on voting-rights issues and is now a visiting legal scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said of the Georgia case. "I still can't believe they would do something this dumb."

Mr. von Spakovsky was involved with the Justice Department's decision four years ago to allow Arizona to implement a similar system that required people to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

Arizona and Georgia are among the nine states, along with parts of seven others, that the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act requires to receive permission from the Justice Department before making changes to voting procedures.

Georgia was sued on the grounds that its new system, which had not been approved in advance by the Justice Department, prevented naturalized citizens from voting. During the case, a judge directed the state to get approval from the Justice Department, and Monday's denial invalidated the verification system.

The Obama administration recently defended that part of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 5, in a case in front of the Supreme Court, arguing that it is still necessary to prevent voter discrimination.

The rulings also were made a week after The Washington Times reported that Justice Department political appointees reversed career lawyers and dropped a voting-intimidation case it already had won against members of the New Black Panther Party.

Mr. von Spakovsky said the differences in the Justice Department's handling of the Arizona and Georgia cases shows how arbitrarily the Voting Rights Act is applied, based on nothing more than the administration in power.