Trump Just Gutted the One Federal Body That Certifies Your Voting Machines. Four Months Before the Midterms.
On Thursday afternoon, a White House aide named Morgan DeWitt Snow sent a brief email to two federal commissioners at approximately 4 PM Eastern time. The email informed them that their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” It thanked them for their service. It did not explain why. It did not give them time to clear their desks. Benjamin Hovland received his while sitting in the middle seat of a commercial flight home from Missouri, where he had spent the day visiting a local election office and an early voting location, learning about measures put in place to protect election workers. He landed. He was fired.
Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules. Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, the two Democratic commissioners, were fired by email. Christy McCormick, the Republican commissioner, was asked to resign. One Republican commissioner, Don Palmer, had already resigned earlier this year, leaving the commission with just three members.
Without a quorum, the commission cannot take formal action on matters ranging from certifying voting systems to updating election guidance for states.
That is the sentence that matters. The commission cannot certify voting systems. The commission cannot update election guidance. The commission cannot act. Four months before the midterm elections.
What the EAC Actually Does
Most Americans have never heard of the Election Assistance Commission. This is by design — it is the kind of institution that functions best when it is invisible, competent, and boring. It was created by Congress in 2002 through the Help America Vote Act, passed after the catastrophic failure of the 2000 presidential election demonstrated that America’s decentralized, underfunded, inconsistent election infrastructure was a national embarrassment.
The EAC oversees the federal testing and certification program for voting systems, accrediting labs and certifying whether machines meet federal standards known as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. In plain English: when your county buys a new voting machine, the EAC is the federal body that tested it and certified it meets minimum standards for accuracy, security, and auditability. If the EAC doesn’t certify it, the machine isn’t supposed to be used.
The commission also serves as a clearinghouse of best practices, helping underfunded local election offices — many of them run by a handful of people in a county courthouse — benefit from the collective knowledge of hundreds of jurisdictions running elections across the country. Hovland said the EAC “has acted as a clearinghouse, sharing best practices between states and helping them use their limited resources to run elections.”
Often, the commission’s decisions were unanimous despite its partisan split. That is the detail that puts the lie to the administration’s justification. A bipartisan commission that regularly reached unanimous decisions was not a partisan obstruction. It was a functional institution doing a necessary job.
The Justification
The White House official cited the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Trump v. Slaughter that expanded the president’s authority to remove officials serving on independent federal agencies when justifying the ouster. “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 White House official said.
Not totally aligned. That is the standard the administration has applied to a bipartisan commission whose decisions were regularly unanimous. Not totally aligned — meaning not fully compliant, not guaranteed to do what the president wants, not stripped of the independence that the commission was specifically designed to possess.
The Help America Vote Act structured the EAC with mandatory bipartisanship precisely because elections are the moment when the government must be most clearly above partisan manipulation. No more than two commissioners can come from the same party. Trump cannot simply install replacement EAC commissioners on his own — commissioners must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
So the administration has fired all three commissioners, left the agency with no one to run it, and cannot replace them quickly because the Senate must confirm any nominees. The EAC is paralyzed. That paralysis is the point.
The Trump-aligned law firm America First Legal had petitioned the EAC to change the federal voter registration form. The EAC posted a notice seeking comments, receiving hundreds of thousands of them in response, but had not yet held a vote. Now there is no commission to hold a vote. The administration gets its desired outcome — no action on the form it doesn’t want changed, no resistance from commissioners who might push back — without having to win the argument. It simply removes the people making the argument.
The Timing
“It’s purely political and will throw the country into chaos to not have a functioning commission four months before the midterm elections,” one source familiar with the firings said.
Four months. The midterms are in November. States and counties are in the process of finalizing their election procedures, training poll workers, testing equipment, and preparing for certification. The federal body that normally supports and coordinates that work is now empty. No commissioners. No quorum. No formal authority to act.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said it was “irresponsible and dangerous that this administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country.” “This undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration,” he added.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a “brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast.”
Hovland said: “When you’re asking more and more of people without giving them the necessary resources, you know, mistakes happen. And so there’s this real risk of like self-fulfilling prophecies in that way. It feels much more like a death-of-1,000-cuts situation than there’s one particular thing that you’re concerned about.”
Death of a thousand cuts. That is the accurate description of what has happened to the integrity of American election administration in eighteen months. The USPS ordered not to deliver mail-in ballots to states that won’t hand over voter rolls. Two hundred and sixty FBI agents sent to find evidence for debunked 2020 conspiracy theories. The voter registration form contested by Trump-aligned lawyers. The EAC fired. The FEC restructured. And now, four months before the midterms, the agency that certifies your voting machines is empty, paralyzed, and unable to act.
Each individual action can be explained. The Supreme Court authorized this one. The law allows that one. The executive branch has authority over the other. Individually, each cut can be justified. Collectively, they form a pattern so clear that only someone committed to not seeing it can miss it.
The man who has spent eighteen months claiming elections are stolen is dismantling, one agency at a time, the infrastructure that makes elections trustworthy. He is doing it before the election he is worried about losing. He is doing it in the open, defended by press secretaries, authorized by Supreme Court decisions he helped create by appointing the justices who wrote them.
Hovland was visiting an election office in Missouri, learning how to protect election workers, when the email arrived. He flew home in a middle seat. He was fired.
The commission he left behind cannot certify a voting machine. It cannot issue guidance. It cannot act.
November is four months away.