Why you should care about Trump gutting the Election Assistance Commission
In the wake of the 2000 elections, there was one thing Democrats and Republicans could agree on: The entire election cycle was a mess that exposed structural and institutional flaws that required reforms.
It wasn’t easy, but Congress ultimately passed the Help America Vote Act (better known as HAVA) in 2002, which included a variety of constructive changes and created a new entity called the Election Assistance Commission.
In the 24 years that followed, the EAC wasn’t particularly controversial. The point of the commission, as its name implies, is to assist state and local election administrators with training, security grants, voluntary election management guidelines and detailed information on best practices, including specifications for testing and certifying election equipment.
There was no reason to gut the commission. Donald Trump did it anyway. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump fired the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, a White House official confirmed to MS NOW.
The move effectively leaves the bipartisan agency without any commissioners and unable to carry out its official duties just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
For all of the Republicans’ overwrought rhetoric about “election security” and “election integrity,” the gutting of the Election Assistance Commission moves the nation in the opposite direction.
Until very recently, such a move wouldn’t have just been seen as a power grab, it also would’ve been recognized as legally dubious: Commission members are Senate-confirmed officials serving on an independent agency. The idea that a president could just send them an email and push them into unemployment was unrealistic.
But after Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court issued their Trump v. Slaughter ruling early last week, the executive branch suddenly had vast new powers to remove independent government regulators and officials at independent federal agencies.
The incumbent president decided to take this new authority out for a spin and started firing Election Assistance Commission members, because the White House decided they “may not be totally aligned” with Trump’s vision.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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