How Trump Broke the Firewall Around American Elections
The White House terminated every remaining commissioner of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission on July 9 — four months before the midterms. This was not incidental. It was the culmination of a coordinated campaign to seize the machinery of American democracy, and it demands a constitutional response.
At roughly four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, an aide in the White House Presidential Personnel Office sent a two-sentence email to Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks — the two Democratic members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — informing them that their service was terminated, effective immediately. Around the same time, the panel’s sole remaining Republican, Christy McCormick, received a phone call asking her to resign. She did. With those three quiet acts, the small, bipartisan federal agency that certifies America’s voting machines, distributes federal election funds, and helps state and local officials run elections was left without a single sitting commissioner, and therefore without the quorum it needs to take formal action of any kind.
The Election Assistance Commission is not a household name. It was created by Congress in the wake of the 2000 Florida recount as an explicitly modest institution: it does not federalize elections; it supports the state and local officials who actually run them. It certifies voting equipment against federal standards. It maintains the national mail voter registration form. It shares best practices, distributes grants, and accredits the labs that test election machines. Its four seats are, by statute, split two-and-two between the parties. That is the entire point of the agency — to be boring, technical, and bipartisan.
Four months before an election that will determine control of Congress, the president of the United States eliminated it.
I. The Agency They Dismantled
Benjamin Hovland was returning from a work trip to a Missouri election office when the email reached him. In an interview with NBC News, he described the EAC’s function as a clearinghouse: the modest but essential work of helping under-resourced local officials share what works. Strip that federal support away, he warned, and the risk is a cascade of small, avoidable failures — a death by a thousand cuts rather than a single dramatic collapse. The consequences fall hardest, he suggested, on precisely the rural and under-funded jurisdictions the administration claims to defend.
Matthew Weil, a vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former EAC staffer, reminded reporters that the agency has been quorumless before. It sat without commissioners for three years starting in December 2011 and was, in his phrase to NBC News, “pretty well hamstrung” through that entire stretch. Certification of new voting systems slowed. Guidance to states stalled. The agency has since developed workarounds allowing career staff to continue narrow functions, but the core work — anything requiring formal commission action — will now simply stop.
And this time, the vacancy is not the accidental product of Senate inaction or expired terms. It is a deliberate act. Presidential appointments to the EAC require Senate confirmation, and no more than two commissioners may come from a single party. Any replacement Trump proposes must clear a slow, partisan Senate — and Democratic senators are unlikely to consent to speed the process along. The commission will be crippled, by design, through the fall election.
“Firing every remaining member of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission months before the midterms is a “brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast,” the Senate Democratic leader said, accusing the president of hollowing out the very agency that certifies the country’s voting systems.”
— Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer · July 9, 2026
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the terminations an extraordinary step that raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support American elections — a warning he explicitly framed as bipartisan, addressed to every American regardless of party. Senator Alex Padilla of California, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, and Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, went further, calling the firings flatly illegal and part of an ongoing effort by the administration to take over the election process.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat whose office runs elections in one of the country’s most contested swing states, was blunter still. He said the administration remains dead set on causing chaos for election officials nationwide, and that the terminations undermine the integrity of nonpartisan election administration itself.
II. Not an Isolated Act — A Coordinated Campaign
To understand what happened on July 9, one must see it as the latest and most brazen move in a campaign that began the moment Trump returned to the White House. In March 2025, the president issued the sweeping executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which directed the EAC — the very agency he has now dismantled — to require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport, on the federal mail voter registration form. The Brennan Center for Justice, in an early legal analysis, warned that the order could disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans — younger voters, voters of color, lower-income voters, and married women whose current names do not match their birth certificates.
Nineteen Democratic-led states sued. Three federal judges have now blocked portions of the order. U.S. District Judge Denise Casper of Massachusetts — an Obama appointee and the chief judge of that district — issued the broadest ruling last month, holding that neither federal law nor the Constitution gives the president any specific power over elections, and that the order was, in her words, unconstitutional and void. Every court to consider the order’s central provisions has struck them down. Every court, in other words, has told the administration it lacks the authority it is now trying to seize by fiat.
The courts blocked the order. So the administration is going around the order — and the courts, and Congress — through other doors at once.
On July 7, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and D.C. warning that they could face criminal liability if noncitizens are found on state voter rolls — a threat legal experts describe as a pressure campaign rather than a serious prosecution strategy, given that the DOJ has yet to win a single case forcing states to hand over voter data.
The DOJ announced it will deploy federal election monitors to 15 jurisdictions across six states — including heavily Democratic cities in Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia — with plans to expand the program before November. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel warned that federal officials do not run elections and pledged to prosecute anyone who tries to intimidate poll workers.
Simultaneously, the department has quietly cancelled election-integrity training for prosecutors, deleted its 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most lawyers in the Public Integrity Section, and — for the first time in decades — failed to establish an Election Day command center to respond to voter intimidation and disinformation.
Postmaster General David Steiner announced last month that the U.S. Postal Service will no longer deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government — an unprecedented use of federal mail policy as political leverage against state election administrators.
Trump has repeatedly declared, most recently on Truth Social, that voter ID will be imposed on the 2026 midterms whether Congress approves it or not — an assertion of unilateral power over federal elections that legal scholars uniformly describe as outside any presidential authority the Constitution or federal statute recognizes.
The president has continued to make baseless fraud claims about elections he lost — the 2020 presidential vote and, more recently, the 2026 California primary — while pardoning a county official convicted of tampering with voting machines. Rick Hasen, the UCLA election law scholar, has said the pattern fits an administration effort to push the myth of mass noncitizen voting and intimidate the officials who run elections.
Each piece, taken alone, could be characterized as aggressive administration or normal political warfare. Taken together, they form a system. A federal agency directs states to impose disenfranchising requirements. Courts block it. The DOJ threatens the officials refusing to comply. Monitors flood into the specific jurisdictions the president has labeled “crooked.” Career prosecutors and their playbook are removed. The postal service withholds ballots from noncompliant states. And now the last vestige of independent, bipartisan federal election oversight — the commission that certifies the machines that count the votes — is destroyed on the eve of the election.
III. The Court That Cleared the Way
None of this would have been possible, in its current form, without the Supreme Court. On June 29, in Trump v. Slaughter, a 6–3 conservative majority overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had for ninety years protected members of independent bipartisan commissions from at-will presidential removal. The Court granted the president sweeping new power over roughly two dozen agencies that Congress had designed to sit outside partisan control. A White House official, confirming the EAC firings to Reuters, expressly invoked the Slaughter decision as the legal justification.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent she read aloud from the bench — an unusual signal of alarm — argued that the majority had granted the president an authority unknown even to the English Crown of the founding era, and warned that dozens of once-independent commissions would now become effectively presidential instruments. Constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky has since observed, plainly, that agency independence in the American system is now gone. The Election Assistance Commission was not the first casualty of the ruling. It will not be the last.
IV. The Sequence, in Order
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V. What This Says About Trump’s Priorities
An administration confident in the honest verdict of the electorate does not fire the umpires. It does not gut the bipartisan agency that certifies its own voting machines. It does not send federal prosecutors with criminal threats to the doors of the officials counting the ballots. It does not withhold the mail from states that decline to hand over their voter rolls. It does not spend the four months before an election dismantling the institutions designed to make that election run smoothly.
Every action the Trump administration has taken on elections since January 2025 has been aimed in a single direction: away from voters and toward control. The president has told his supporters, publicly and repeatedly, that Republicans should “take over the voting.” Senate Democratic leadership noted, correctly, that the July 9 firings were another step toward exactly that stated project. This is not the ordinary give-and-take of election policy. It is the deliberate erosion of the machinery of self-government by the very person the machinery was designed to constrain.
The GOP, for its part, has offered no institutional check. A Republican Congress has not called the president’s assault on the Election Assistance Commission into question. A Republican Justice Department is executing the intimidation campaign. A Republican Supreme Court has cleared the legal path. The party that once styled itself the defender of federalism now watches, silent, as a president dismantles a bipartisan federal commission by executive fiat and drags voter registration under presidential control.
The framers left the word “unable” undefined — on purpose.
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or such other body as Congress may by law provide, to declare that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The amendment does not define unable. It does not define inability. The framers, working in the years after the Kennedy assassination, deliberately chose open-ended language. Legal historians and constitutional scholars, as PBS NewsHour has documented, understood at the time that no drafter could anticipate every scenario in which a president might become unfit. Representative Richard Poff of Virginia, one of the amendment’s principal Republican architects, said explicitly that Section 4 was meant to reach not only unconscious presidents but any president “unable or unwilling to make any rational decision” — including the decision to step aside.
Dozens of sitting members of Congress have already made the constitutional case. In April 2026, more than eighty-five House and Senate Democrats — including Senators Ed Markey and Chris Murphy, and Representatives Ro Khanna, Sara Jacobs, Joaquin Castro, Yassamin Ansari, and Melanie Stansbury — publicly called on the vice president and Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation to establish the independent commission Section 4 explicitly authorizes Congress to create — a body that Congress never got around to constituting in the fifty-nine years since the amendment was ratified.
The constitutional argument on the elections question is straightforward. A president who dismantles the bipartisan federal agency responsible for certifying the machines that count the votes in the election that will determine whether he retains political power is not exercising ordinary policy discretion. He is acting in a manner that is functionally incompatible with the office he holds. The president’s principal constitutional duty is to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed. The National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the constitutional allocation of election authority to the states and to Congress are among those laws. An officeholder who systematically works to nullify them cannot faithfully execute them. That is not a policy disagreement. It is a structural inability to discharge the duties of the office.
The practical barriers are real, and honesty requires naming them. Vice President J.D. Vance has given no indication he would join a Section 4 declaration. A Cabinet composed of loyalists is exceedingly unlikely to declare its own principal unfit. A Republican Congress will not pass Raskin’s implementing legislation. Permanent removal ultimately requires two-thirds majorities in both chambers, and that math is not there.
But those barriers do not negate the constitutional argument — they merely name the political failure. The framers wrote Section 4 into the Constitution precisely so that the political system would have a lawful, orderly answer to a president who could not or would not discharge his office. That the current officeholders of Congress and the Cabinet lack the will to apply the remedy does not mean the remedy is inapplicable. It means the remedy exists, and is being refused. The record will note the refusal.
VI. What Is Required Now
Every state secretary of state, of both parties, should publicly commit to certifying election results based on the actual ballots cast, regardless of pressure from a Justice Department that has broken with fifty years of professional norms. Every federal court now hearing challenges to the administration’s elections orders should recognize the pattern for what it is, and rule accordingly. Every senator with a Senate confirmation vote on future EAC nominees should refuse to seat any commissioner who cannot answer, on the record, whether he or she believes the president who nominated them has the authority to unilaterally alter federal election rules. And every American who intends to vote in November should register now, verify their registration weekly, and refuse to be intimidated out of the exercise of the franchise.
The republic is not lost. But the guardrails that once made this kind of assault unthinkable have been removed, one by one, and the last of the bipartisan election guardrails came down on Thursday afternoon by email. What replaces them, if anything, will not be a gift from this president or this Congress or this Court. It will be built by voters, election officials, journalists, and the state attorneys general who have already gone to court and won.
Editorial Conclusion
An American president has, in the span of sixteen months, dismantled the independent bipartisan agency that certifies our voting machines, threatened the officials who count our votes with criminal prosecution, ordered the postal service to withhold ballots from states that will not surrender their voter rolls, and told his own party that Republicans should “take over the voting.” He has done this openly. He has done it in the four months before an election.
This is not a policy disagreement to be resolved at the ballot box. It is a direct assault on the ballot box itself. The framers of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment wrote its critical language deliberately open — unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office — because they trusted a future generation to recognize that inability when they saw it. This generation is seeing it. What remains to be seen is whether it has the courage to name it, and act.
Sources & References
- NBC News — Trump ousts remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission ahead of midterms. Read →
- Reuters / U.S. News — Trump Fires Election Assistance Commission Members Ahead of Midterms. Read →
- Votebeat — Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act. Read →
- Senate Democratic Leadership — Statement from Leader Schumer on the EAC firings. Read →
- The Hill — Trump fires Democratic members of Election Assistance Commission. Read →
- UPI — Trump reportedly removes remaining members of election commission. Read →
- Forbes — Trump Fires Members Of Federal Election Body Ahead Of Midterms. Read →
- Brennan Center for Justice — The President’s March 2025 Executive Order on Elections, Explained. Read →
- Newsweek — Trump’s Proof of Citizenship Requirement Struck Down as Unconstitutional. Read →
- Democracy Docket — Trump: There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Read →
- NOTUS — DOJ Issues Nationwide Threat to Prosecute Local Election Officials. Read →
- NOTUS — The Justice Department Hasn’t Taken Its Usual Steps to Protect the 2026 Election. Read →
- Votebeat — Trump administration warns election officials about noncitizen voting in 2026 midterms. Read →
- Newsweek — Map shows states where Trump admin is deploying election monitors. Read →
- SCOTUSblog — Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner, overturns Humphrey’s Executor. Read →
- NPR — Supreme Court cements Trump’s power over agencies long considered independent. Read →
- PBS NewsHour — Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Here’s how it works. Read →
- House Judiciary Committee Democrats — Ranking Member Raskin Introduces Commission on Presidential Capacity legislation. Read →
- NBC News — Dozens of Democrats call for Trump’s removal after his Iran threats. Read →
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