Trump Fires Election Commission's Democratic Members, Cites Supreme Court Ruling on Removal Power

President Trump has removed both Democratic members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the four-person federal body that distributes election grants to states, certifies voting machines, and maintains the national voter registration form.

The White House confirmed the action Friday in a statement to the Associated Press, saying Trump "reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections." The statement pointed to the Supreme Court's Slaughter decision as the legal basis, a ruling that expanded presidential authority to fire members of independent agency boards.

Democrats Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland are out. The commission's lone Republican, Christy McCormick, had already resigned before Trump's action. Another Republican commissioner, Donald Palmer, left voluntarily earlier this year. VoteBeat first reported the personnel changes.

That leaves the commission with zero sitting members, despite a federal law requiring two Democrats and two Republicans by statute. Congress created the EAC in 2002 under the Help America Vote Act, signed by President George W. Bush, specifically to keep it bipartisan and insulated from a single party's control.

The EAC had declined to add a citizenship-documentation requirement to the national voter registration form, something Trump demanded in a March 2025 executive order overhauling federal elections. A federal judge blocked that order, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, authority over election administration. The administration has said it will appeal.

Requiring proof of citizenship to register is a position with real public support and it addresses a legitimate concern: noncitizens are already barred from voting in federal elections, and documentary proof closes a gap that self-attestation on the current form doesn't. Critics counter that documented cases of noncitizen voting are rare and that citizenship-document mandates can trip up eligible voters who lack easy access to birth certificates or passports. Both are true. Neither settles whether the EAC, or the president unilaterally, gets to decide the fix.

The White House has not laid out whether it plans to nominate replacements or leave the commission gutted heading into November. Left vacant, the agency's ability to certify voting-system upgrades and disburse grants to state and local election offices could stall at the worst possible time, months before ballots go out.

This isn't an isolated move. The White House's own "Trump Delivers" roundup, published August 26, touts a separate Supreme Court ruling that let Trump's executive order tightening mail-in voting rules take effect ahead of the midterms, overturning a lower court block that 23 Democratic-led states had won. Together, the EAC firings and the mail-in ruling represent a coordinated push to centralize more control over election mechanics in the executive branch.

Trump has been explicit for years that he views the people counting votes as just as important as the candidates on the ballot. He told Pennsylvania Republicans in 2022, "we're going to have to be a lot sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote." Fox News reported the RNC has built out a multimillion-dollar election integrity operation, with Chair Joe Gruters saying the party is 42% ahead of its 2024 poll-worker recruitment pace, with 16,971 signups compared to 11,917 at the same point last cycle.

Democrats are playing catch-up. Fox News noted the DNC faces "widely reported fundraising hiccups" against the RNC's $128.5 million war chest.

California in the Crosshairs

Al Jazeera reported that Trump has singled out California as a target of his fraud claims, telling Fox News host Lara Trump in May that "California is very fraud... The whole thing is a fraud... They don't have voting booths. Everything's by mail." That's false. California does have in-person voting locations; it simply also mails every registered voter a ballot automatically, a system the state adopted well before Trump's presidency.

Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Matt Moreles told Al Jazeera his office is focused on "clear and consistent messaging that cuts through all of the misinformation," rather than legal confrontation. California is heavily Democratic, with about 45% of registered voters identifying as Democrats versus 25% Republicans, according to Al Jazeera, which is likely part of why the state draws Trump's attention as Democrats are favored to win seats there in November.

What's Unresolved

No court has yet ruled on whether firing EAC commissioners, leaving the panel below its statutory quorum, is itself lawful. The Slaughter precedent cited by the White House addressed removal power broadly, but whether it overrides HAVA's explicit bipartisan-composition mandate hasn't been tested in this specific context. Expect a legal challenge, and expect it to move fast given how close the midterms are.

Meanwhile, the mail-in voting order faces its own ongoing litigation from the 23 states that sued, even after the Supreme Court allowed it to take effect while the case continues. Whether the EAC gets refilled, and with whom, will signal how much of this is really about election security versus consolidating advantage before November.