Donald Trump ousts election commission members in latest push to reshape US voting process 29%
By Bill Barrow The Associated Press51%
7/10/2026, 4:22:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 3 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion and Politically Left Leaning Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 9.1% saturation with 73 hits. Analysis detected 131 faulty-reasoning hits from 800 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.4% and a BS Rank of 29% (10,024 of 13,944 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 71.90% of the article peer group.
President Donald Trump has ousted members of a bipartisan federal election commission that resisted his efforts to require would-be voters to document their U.S. citizenship before registering.
The White House on Friday confirmed the executive action against members of the Election Assistance Commission, which distributes federal grants to states, oversees the testing of voting systems and maintains the national voter registration form.
It’s the latest instance of the Republican president trying to exert White House influence over how U.S. elections are conducted.
It’s also the first test of his newly expanded presidential powers to fire members of independent executive agencies from their posts without cause.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 last month in the case of former Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter that Trump had wide executive authority to fire political appointees of independent executive agencies.
Trump had fired Slaughter without cause despite a provision of federal law that required a reason and a nearly century-old Supreme Court precedent insulating independent agency heads from presidential whims.
The president removed the four-seat commission’s two Democratic members, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland.
The panel’s Republican member, Christy McCormick resigned.
Former Republican Commissioner Donald Palmer already had left his post voluntarily earlier this year.
The changes were first reported by VoteBeat, a news outlet that covers elections and voting across the U.S.
Trump has repeatedly tried to reshape voting regulations, even though the U.S.
Constitution grants control of elections to the states and not the president.
Still, Trump has largely been powerless to change election processes through executive fiat, and David Becker, a former Department of Justice attorney who runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said his purge of the EAC wouldn’t alter that.
“This doesn’t really change anything about how our elections will be run, and how states are successfully ensuring secure, convenient, safe elections,” Becker wrote Friday morning on the social media site BlueSky.
Critics respond
On Capitol Hill, the leading Democrats with election oversight responsibility said Trump, rather than bolstering U.S. election integrity, is further politicizing the voting process.
“President Trump is trying to dismantle yet another independent guardrail of our democracy designed to keep elections fair and secure,” said Sen.
Alex Padilla, D-California, and Rep.
Joe Morelle, D-New York.
“Purging commissioners just months before the midterm elections and further gutting support for our state and local elections officials is a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections and enable more unlawful and dangerous election interference.”
Padilla is the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, and Morelle is ranking member of the House Administration Committee.
The lawmakers noted the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled Trump’s move with its decision to “upend decades of executive power to appease the President.”
It was not clear whether Trump planned to nominate new members immediately or leave the positions vacant — a move that, months ahead of midterm elections, could prevent the agency from distributing new grants to state or local elections offices and perhaps complicate its role in overseeing testing and certification of voting systems around the country.
Congress created the commission as part of the Help America Vote Act, a bipartisan law signed by Republican President George W.
Bush in 2002.
The act requires the commission to include two Democrats and two Republicans, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Hicks and McCormick were appointed by President Barack Obama.
Trump appointed Hovland during his first presidency.
According to VoteBeat, Hicks and Hovland were notified of their removal by an email signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, the deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President.
Hicks and Hovland could challenge their dismissals, but that ultimately could require the Supreme Court to revisit two decisions it just issued on the president’s power over independent agencies.
In the Slaughter decision, the court’s six conservatives said the previous restrictions on presidential prerogatives violated the Constitution’s separation of powers.
The logic extends to other agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump also has fired board members.
In the separate case of Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, whom Trump had tried to fire, a 5-4 majority deviated from the Slaughter decision and ruled the president could not fire central bank governors without cause.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the court’s three liberals in the Cook case.
They justified their exception to their Slaughter reasoning by citing the central bank’s unique structure as congressionally chartered but independent, quasi-private institution whose “appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design” and its role in setting monetary policy that shapes the U.S. and world economy.
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