Trump Removes Every Remaining Election Assistance Commissioner Months Before the Midterms (July 2026)

What Happened

On July 9, 2026, the White House removed every remaining member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, received an email from Morgan DeWitt, deputy director of Presidential Personnel, telling them their positions were "terminated, effective immediately." The Republican commissioner, Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign. The fourth seat had been vacant since Republican Donald Palmer left earlier in the year to join the Heritage Foundation. The agency was left without a single commissioner.

The White House did not cite misconduct. It said that "the President 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," and a White House official said that "the Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so." That was a reference to the Supreme Court's June 29 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which overturned Humphrey's Executor in a case about the Federal Trade Commission.

Senator Mark Warner called the removals an "extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections."

Why the EAC Matters

Congress created the EAC in the Help America Vote Act of 2002, after the 2000 election, as a deliberately bipartisan body: four commissioners, no more than two from one party, confirmed by the Senate. Formal action requires three votes. The commission adopts the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines that many states use to certify their equipment, maintains the national mail voter registration form, and distributes federal election funds.

Without a quorum, the EAC cannot adopt or change voting-system guidelines or take any other formal vote. Votebeat reported that day-to-day work continues through career staff. Testing and certification of voting systems against standards already adopted can proceed, and formula-based payments to states continue. Restoring a quorum requires presidential nominations and Senate confirmation, and nominations had not been announced when this entry was last updated.

The Proof-of-Citizenship Context

Trump's March 2025 election executive order (EO 14248) directed the EAC to require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship on the national voter registration form. Federal courts blocked that directive. Separately, the Trump-aligned legal group America First Legal petitioned the EAC to make the same change. ProPublica reported that the commission had received hundreds of thousands of public comments on that petition and had not voted on it when its members were removed. Nextgov noted that the EAC had previously declined to add the requirement.

Legal Analysis

The removals were the first use of the new Slaughter removal power against an agency whose job is running elections. Slaughter involved the FTC, an agency that enforces economic regulation. Whether its reasoning extends to a commission that Congress made bipartisan by statute, specifically to keep either party from controlling election administration, has not been decided by any court.

The documented harm is structural. The one federal body built to give both parties an equal voice in election administration now has no members. Any future reconstitution depends entirely on the president's choice of nominees, and the timing makes the removal more serious: it happened in the final four months before a national election, as the administration was pressing states on voter-roll data and citizenship verification (see voter-suppression-election-interference).

Classification

This entry is classified as an enabling condition. It is not an international crime. Impartial administration is a precondition of the "genuine periodic elections" guaranteed by Article 25 of the ICCPR, and removing the bipartisan body charged with election-administration standards, on the stated ground that its members were not "totally aligned" with the president, weakens that guarantee.