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.
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