The White House ousted all three sitting members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, hamstringing the bipartisan agency ahead of the midterm elections.
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The Democratic commissioners — Thomas Hicks and Benjamin W. Hovland — were fired by email, two people familiar with their terminations said. One of the sources also said Republican commissioner Christy McCormick received a call and was asked to resign.
“They will be replaced,” said a White House official who confirmed that all three commissioners are gone. Presidential appointments to the EAC are subject to Senate confirmation — by no means a quick process.
White House aide Morgan DeWitt Snow sent the Democratic commissioners a brief email of termination around 4 p.m. ET, one of the people familiar with the dismissals said.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the person said the email read.
The EAC is a bipartisan commission that helps state and local officials run elections, certifying election equipment and working with other agencies to ensure state and local elections run smoothly. From 2018 to 2025, it distributed more than $1 billion in grants for election security, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Hovland, one of the Democratic commissioners, told NBC News he was returning from a work trip to a Missouri election office when he was fired.
The EAC, he said, has acted as a clearinghouse, sharing best practices between states and helping them use their limited resources to run elections. Taking away a key federal agency designed to help state and local election administrators will have a negative impact, 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,” he said. “It feels much more like a death-of-1,000-cuts situation than there’s one particular thing that you’re concerned about.”
The commission normally has two Republicans and two Democrats; one Republican, Don Palmer, resigned this year, leaving it with just three members.
One of the sources familiar with the firings said of the White House’s actions, “It’s purely political and will throw the country into chaos to not have a functioning commission four months before the midterm elections.”
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, said in a statement that 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.
Matthew Weil, a vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former EAC staffer, told NBC News that the panel was left without commissioners for three years starting in December 2011.
He said the agency was “pretty well hamstrung” then but has since made changes to allow its staff to do some work, like certifying election equipment.
Still, Weil said, the commissioners are needed to adapt to changes, set new policies and coordinate with local election officials.
Hovland, who said he was notified of his firing while in the airport before flying home in the middle seat on a commercial flight, added that he hoped people would consider volunteering to serve as a poll worker in the midterms.
“So much of what the agency was created to do was help election officials, but there’s a lot that Americans can do along those lines too, and that’s serving as a poll worker,” he said. “I think they’ll hopefully get a glimpse of of the privilege that I’ve had to see across the country.”
