WASHINGTON – The email arrived without warning. Benjamin Hovland, the only remaining chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, learned Wednesday that his job was gone, not through a call from the White House, not through a formal notification, but through a brief message in his inbox telling him the president had decided to remove him.
By Wednesday afternoon, all three remaining EAC commissioners had been dismissed. The commission was left without anyone to run it, four months before Americans go to the polls for the 2026 midterm elections.
The commission was created by Congress after the contested 2000 presidential recount in Florida, which exposed how inconsistent voting equipment across counties could produce wildly different outcomes in close races. Under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, it holds the exclusive federal authority to certify whether voting systems meet security standards.
“I’m devastated,” Hovland told NBC News after receiving the email. “Not for myself, but for the election administrators across the country who depend on the EAC’s resources and expertise to run secure elections.”
The EAC has no enforcement powers and no say over how elections are actually conducted; that authority rests with the states. What it does have is the exclusive legal authority to certify whether voting equipment meets federal security standards. Without commissioners, no new machines can receive that certification, and no existing certifications can be reviewed or updated.
The commission also administers more than $1 billion in federal grants that flow to state and local election offices to upgrade equipment, train poll workers and expand access to voting. That money is now in administrative limbo.
Two of the three dismissed commissioners, Hovland and fellow Democrat Diane Byrd Hicks, said they received only an email. The third, Republican commissioner Don Palmer, had been asked to resign before the email dismissals were sent, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. Palmer did not publicly comment.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who has worked closely with the EAC on election security standards, called the move “a direct attack on the ability of states to certify their own voting equipment.” He said Arizona still had 14 pending certification questions before the EAC at the time of the dismissals.
The Trump administration has not said whether it intends to appoint new commissioners. The White House did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday evening. The Help America Vote Act allows the president to appoint commissioners with Senate confirmation, but the commission has operated at reduced capacity for years due to slow-walked nominations.
The dismissals arrived weeks after the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Trump v. Slaughter that sharply limited the ability of independent agency officials to contest their own removal. That ruling, handed down in June, was seen by legal experts as effectively blessing presidential removal authority over commissioners and board members across a range of federal agencies that had previously operated with statutory protections.
“The Supreme Court essentially handed the White House a key that unlocks every independent agency in Washington,” said one election law professor, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss pending litigation. “The EAC was always going to be one of the first doors they opened.”
The dismantling of the commission creates practical problems that election administrators say cannot easily be resolved before November. Several states have equipment refresh cycles that require EAC certification for any new machines they purchase. Without active commissioners, vendors cannot submit new systems for review and states cannot replace aging equipment that has failed certification reviews.
Democrats in Congress moved quickly to signal they would seek accountability. The Senate Minority Leader’s office said it planned to request an emergency briefing from the Department of Justice on the legal basis for the dismissals. A group of House Democrats had already pressed for independent midterm election oversight, a concern the EAC’s collapse has amplified.
Republican secretaries of state issued statements largely praising the administration’s ability to restructure agencies it deemed ineffective. Democratic counterparts warned of cascading effects on election infrastructure they said could not be repaired before November.
What remains unresolved is whether any of the dismissed commissioners will challenge their removal in federal court. Hovland’s public statement did not threaten litigation. Legal advocates said privately that options were being explored, though any injunction request would face a legal landscape fundamentally altered by the Slaughter ruling.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided a voter registration organization in Ohio last month in a move that election integrity advocates said signaled the administration’s broader approach to the 2026 election cycle. The EAC’s collapse removes another institutional safeguard from a cycle already testing the limits of American electoral administration.
What the administration will do with the commission’s physical operations, its staff and the roughly $1 billion in pending grant authorizations remains unclear. A federal agency without commissioners is not automatically abolished, but it is, for now, paralyzed.
