- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules.
The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified by email. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email said. It was signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President.
The third commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign, according to three sources within the agency. McCormick declined to comment when reached by phone. The agency’s fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, voluntarily departed the agency earlier this year to join the Heritage Foundation.
The EAC supports elections but doesn’t run them, states and counties do that. So firing all its members freezes a federal support office, not the election machinery itself.
Think of it as the standards lab that certifies equipment and hands out funds, not the referee on the field. The main effects:
• Frozen certification of new voting machines (existing ones stay valid). So new companies can’t provide new equipment. Possibly means ‘the fix is in’ by Musk or associates
• No rule changes to the federal registration form — which also blocks the administration from adding things like proof-of-citizenship before November. So this looks more like the regime is shooting it’s own foot here.
• Stalled grants and guidance to states.
Bottom line: it’s closer to paralysis than takeover, and it doesn’t change how you vote. The real open question is legal — whether firing bipartisan election commissioners survives a court challenge… if it is ever challenged in court by the dormant democrats.
This needs to be higher. Misleading headlines can cause people to panic, and do more harm than good.
What’s happening is certainly a bad thing, and alarming, and corrupt, but all is not lost. We still need to vote (and can!).
Context matters.
You think that’s going to stop them? lol. You must be new around here. They broke it so they can “fix” it the way they always wanted it.
And they already won the court case. It was earlier this week at SCOTUS.
I’m not going to be surprised when they declare this election a horrible loss due to illegal voting in blue states no matter what the outcome is. Then they’ll use the noncompliance with illegal demands and lack of a federal oversight committee to declare an emergency around late October 2028.
What does that even mean tho? They declare random bullshit all the time and we all go “that’s nice dear” and get back to whatever we were doing already. What’s their plan after making this declaration?
This is what I was thinking as well, either there’s something that the EAC was expected to do which he’s trying to prevent or he just decided to fire people he doesn’t like regardless of the consequences to himself
On an unrelated note: I would avoid doing bullet points followed by a sentence starting with “bottom line” or any similar turn of phrase. That’s a common format LLMs spit out. The actual contents of your comment read human written and have plenty choices of phrase that I don’t see coming out of an LLM, so I figured I’d point it out
I have called out people on here to stop doing that too. All it does is lower your credibility.