What happened
President Donald Trump Thursday pushed out the remaining three members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, firing the two Democratic commissioners while allowing the Republican member to resign. The fourth member, a Republican, quit in April to join the Heritage Foundation.
Who said what
The EAC, an independent agency created in 2002, is a “crucial guardrail for ensuring election security across the country,” The New York Times said. Trump’s ouster of its leadership is an “apparent move to assert control over voting ahead of the midterms,” Politico said, and “election officials across the country expressed various degrees of confusion and alarm.” Trump issued executive orders last year to require proof of citizenship on the EAC-maintained national voter registration form and to “block the EAC from distributing funds to states that did not adjust voter forms to have a citizenship check,” but were both “blocked in court.”
What next?
The Supreme Court last month gave Trump “precedence” 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,” a White House official said Thursday. Without at least three Senate-confirmed “bipartisan replacements,” NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice said, the EAC “cannot lawfully make any decisions that affect how Americans vote.”