Trump Removes the Last Election Assistance Commissioners, Leaving the Agency Without a Quorum

What happened this week

On Thursday, July 9, 2026, the White House removed the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The two Democratic commissioners, chair Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were fired by email, and the lone remaining Republican, Christy McCormick, was called and asked to resign (Votebeat, July 9, 2026; NPR, July 9, 2026). A fourth seat had already emptied earlier in 2026 when Republican Donald Palmer left for the Heritage Foundation (Votebeat, July 9, 2026).

The termination email, sent by a White House aide, told the commissioners that their position was terminated effective immediately (Votebeat, July 9, 2026). Hicks had served on the commission since 2014. Hovland joined in 2019 after a unanimous Senate confirmation (Votebeat, July 9, 2026). The practical result is a number: the commission now has zero seated members, and a body designed to run on bipartisan agreement has no one left to agree (The Washington Post, July 10, 2026).

Why a quorum matters here

Congress built the Election Assistance Commission in the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the law passed after the disputed 2000 presidential election (U.S. Election Assistance Commission, About the EAC; Just Security, July 2026). The design is deliberately bipartisan. The commission seats four members, no more than two from the same political party, each nominated by the president on recommendations from congressional leadership and confirmed by the Senate (Just Security, July 2026).

The number that decides everything is three. The statute requires an affirmative vote of at least three commissioners to conduct official business or set policy, a fixed rule written to force bipartisan buy-in on anything consequential (Just Security, July 2026). With four seats a party can hold at most two, so nothing moves without at least one vote from across the aisle. With zero seats filled, the agency is below the line entirely. It cannot update the national mail voter registration form, certify new voting systems, or formally move certain federal election funds until the Senate confirms new members (Votebeat, July 9, 2026; The Washington Post, July 10, 2026).

What the agency does, and what it does not

The distinction that matters most this week is the one easiest to lose. The Election Assistance Commission does not run elections. Its job is narrow and mostly supportive: it distributes federal election grants to the states, maintains the national mail voter registration form, tests and certifies voting equipment against voluntary guidelines, and issues guidance that state and local officials are free to use or set aside (U.S. Election Assistance Commission, About the EAC; Votebeat, July 9, 2026). None of those functions is the act of opening a polling place, printing a ballot, or counting a vote.

Those acts happen somewhere else. American elections are administered by the states and by roughly 10,000 local election jurisdictions, from big county boards to small township clerks (Congressional Research Service, The Election Administration and Voting Survey, 2026). That decentralization is the answer to the question the week raises. A federal board without a quorum stalls federal standards work and some grant activity. It does not reach into a county courthouse and stop the count. The machinery that decides elections was never seated in Washington.

The record the machinery just posted

It helps to know how that machinery performed the last time it was tested at full scale. In 2024, more than 158 million ballots were counted at roughly 65 percent turnout, documented across thousands of local jurisdictions in the commission's own Election Administration and Voting Survey, released June 30, 2025 (U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 2024 EAVS, 2025). The count cleared without a documented systemic tabulation failure.

The longer trend points the same direction. The national average score on the MIT Election Data and Science Lab's Elections Performance Index, a 19-indicator measure of how well states run elections, rose from about 63 percent in 2008 to 80 percent in the 2024 edition released in April 2026 (MIT Elections Performance Index, 2026). Wait times improved even as voters returned to the polls in person: the share of Election Day voters waiting more than 30 minutes fell from 14 percent in 2020 to 11 percent in 2024 (MIT Survey of the Performance of American Elections, 2025). Our ranking of the states by how well they administer elections, red and blue alike, sits at states by election administration quality. The point is not that the commission is unimportant. It is that the country's ability to count votes rests on institutions the firing did not touch.

What to watch

Three markers will show where this goes. First, whether the president sends nominations to the Senate and whether the Senate confirms them, because the commission stays frozen at zero until it does, and confirmation requires floor time in a chamber already tangled over other election measures. Second, whether any state reports a concrete gap, a delayed grant, a stalled equipment certification, or an unrevised federal form, that traces back to the empty commission before November. Third, whether the routine work of the midterms, registration deadlines, ballot printing, and poll worker training, proceeds on schedule in the states, which is where the answer to the loudest fears will actually be found. A bipartisan agency with no members is a real institutional gap. It is also a narrower one than the headline suggests, because the votes are counted in the states, and the states have kept counting.