The Election Assistance Commission doesn't touch ballots or voter rolls — it just helps states run elections smoothly. Trump just fired everyone on it, four months out from the midterms, using new power from a Roberts Supreme Court ruling that dropped last month—nothing to see here.
Trump has cleared out the last people standing at the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that helps states run elections — and he did it four months before the midterms, which is either a coincidence or exactly the point, VoteBeat reports.
The two Democrats on the commission, Chair Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were fired outright. The lone Republican, Christy McCormick, got to resign instead, which is a nice touch. The agency was created to be split down the middle. Now it's empty.
Congress created this agency in 2002 specifically so it couldn't be steamrolled by one party — now it has no one in charge at all. No one.
To be clear about what the EAC actually does, because it's not glamorous: it doesn't touch ballots, doesn't talk to voters, and has zero authority over state election officials. What it does do is help train election officials, keep them current on voting tech, run the national mail voter registration form (the same one Trump already tried to rewrite by executive order last year), certify voting machines, and hand out election security grants.
In other words: not the shadowy deep-state puppet-master you'd need to invent a conspiracy about. Just the boring, useful plumbing behind how elections actually function — which is apparently exactly what needed to go.
Via VoteBeat:
The firings leave the four-member commission with no commissioners, meaning it cannot take official action until new members are installed. They also come days after the Supreme Court granted the president power to fire leaders of independent agencies, weakening a legal framework that for decades had insulated bipartisan federal commissions from direct White House control.
The mechanism is the fun part: this rides directly on the Roberts Supreme Court's Slaughter decision from late last month, which gave the president more latitude to remove officials from independent agencies. So it's not just an EAC story — it's the first big test of exactly how much runway Slaughter gave him, and he's using it to clear out the one agency literally designed to keep election administration nonpartisan.
A White House official defended the fuckery.
“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official told Politico.
The 'not totally aligned' line is doing some real Orwellian lifting for what is, structurally, a bipartisan watchdog board. Funny thing about a man who's spent years screaming the elections are rigged — turns out he just wanted to be the one holding the dial. And if you don't think Trump's circle already tried to put a thumb on the scale last time (see: Elon Musk), I've got an algae-proof reflecting pool in DC to sell you.
Sen. Mark Warner weighed in.
