Trump Fires The Last Members Of The Bipartisan Agency That Runs America's Elections, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Body Overseeing How The Country Votes Could Still Gather A Quorum To Do It

WASHINGTON. In a move his administration described as long overdue housekeeping, President Donald J. Trump on Thursday dismissed the last remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the small bipartisan agency created after the disputed 2000 election to help states run their elections, resolving a long-standing concern that the body overseeing how Americans vote could still assemble enough people to make a decision.

The two Democratic commissioners, chairman Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, learned of their removal by email, while the lone Republican commissioner, Christy McCormick, was reached by telephone and invited to resign. The dismissals leave the commission, which by law seats four members and may hold no more than two from a single party, with zero. Under the Help America Vote Act, the agency needs the votes of three commissioners to conduct any official business, a threshold officials noted it can no longer meet, and now never has to.

Established in 2002 so that the federal government would never again spend five weeks squinting at punch cards, the commission certifies the nation's voting machines, maintains the national mail voter registration form, and distributes federal election funding to the states. As of Thursday it does none of these things, an outcome the White House characterized as a return to efficiency.

"The president has determined that the agency was not functioning as he would like," said one official within the administration, who added that Mr. Trump retained full authority to appoint replacements the moment the Senate confirmed them, a process the official described as "his to begin whenever the timing feels right." Pressed on when that might be, the official noted that the midterm elections were still nearly four months away and that the commission's work could wait.

The White House grounded the firings in the Supreme Court's June 29 decision granting the president broad power to remove the leadership of agencies that Congress had designed to be independent, a ruling the administration has cited repeatedly since to justify clearing out officials at other bodies built to operate beyond a president's reach. Legal scholars observed that Mr. Trump cannot unilaterally install new commissioners, meaning the agency responsible for the integrity of the machines Americans will use in November is likely to enter the election with no one in charge of it.

At press time, the president had assured the country that an empty election commission would have no effect whatsoever on the fairness of the coming vote, a fairness he added he would personally be the one to determine.