michael 
Last week, The Gateway Pundit reported that President Trump exercised his newly confirmed executive power to terminate the service of so-called ‘independent’ federal agency commissioners. The authority of the chief executive of the United States was upheld by the Supreme Court in the Slaughter decision late last month.
In his first major flex of this authority, President Trump terminated two Democrat commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), while the third member, a Republican, resigned voluntarily.
This move by President Trump has drawn outrage from Democrat politicians and their horde of activists masquerading as “election-integrity proponents”.
However, it’s notable that the EAC has previously operated not just without a quorum, but without any commissioners for almost three years from December 30, 2011, through December 16, 2014, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. In fact, the “independent” federal agency has been without a quorum for one in every five days of its existence.
Former Democrat commissioner Benjamin Hovland sat down with NPR for an interview published Monday.
Hovland acknowledged that “in some ways” he knew his termination was coming, citing the Slaughter decision.
Outlining the major functions of the EAC, which was created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) following the contentious 2000 election, Hovland stated that the EAC was “charged…with certifying voting equipment, distributing grant money from Congress, doing 50-state research to be able to help with data-driven decisions, and then serving as a clearinghouse for best practices across the country.”
He continued that the “great staff in place” will “continue to do their work;” however, “the adoption of things like the new voting system standards…can’t happen without a quorum.” Hovland also asserted that “election officials across party lines benefited from the work of the commission,” attributing a joke to a colleague that “assistance is our middle name.”
When asked if Hovland felt that the firings were “part of the president’s efforts to influence elections or to interfere with them to benefit himself and his party,” he responded:
I think it’s very concerning. I certainly think that it is an erosion of sort of the norms and the structures. As you mentioned earlier, you know, the agency was set up to be a bipartisan, independent agency. So much of election administration, you have bipartisan teams.
And that’s a checks and balances, with the parties working together to agree on the rules so that you know how the elections are going to be run, and ultimately so the winner can be confident, and the loser can be confident and acknowledge that they lost their race. And as you eliminate things – or if you get rid of commissioners, for example – or as you eliminate some of these other sort of safeguards or norms, it certainly strains the system. And it certainly also likely causes people to lose faith in our democracy and in the process and their confidence in our elections. And that’s very concerning.
Expired Accreditations Attributed to ‘COVID-19’
Hovland and his fellow Democrat board member, Thomas Hicks, were appointed by Barack Obama. Hovland was confirmed by the Senate and seated in January 2019, while Hicks was sworn in and seated in January 2015.
Section 231(b) of HAVA (42 U.S.C. §15371(b)) requires the EAC to provide accreditation and revocation of accreditation of “independent non-federal laboratories qualified to test voting systems to federal standards.”
However, as reported by The Gateway Pundit, one of the Voting System Test Labs (VSTL) that was tasked with this certification in the 2020 election had accreditations that expired in February 2017. Accreditations expire every two years, and the EAC had not published the updated credential for more than three years following the 2017 expiration.
When this was discovered by independent researchers following the contentious 2020 election, the EAC’s then-Voting System Testing and Certification Director Jerome Lovato wrote in a January 2021 memo:
“Due to the outstanding circumstances posed by COVID-19, the renewal process for EAC laboratories has been delayed for an extended period. While this process continues, Pro V&V retains its EAC VSTL accreditation.”
This was within the scope of SLI Compliance’s accreditation (which had expired just weeks prior to the notice), but the claim fell short for Pro V&V, whose accreditation had expired more than three years before COVID-19 was a “pandemic.” SLI Compliance’s accreditation faced additional scrutiny, however, because its previous accreditation was for a three-year term while the law limited it to two-year terms.
Outdated “Guidelines”
The EAC is also responsible for developing the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG). According to EAC.gov:
Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) are a set of specifications and requirements against which voting systems can be tested to determine if they meet required standards.
Up until February 2021, the EAC utilized VVSG 1.0 and 1.1 as the standard against which it tested.
For context, VVSG 1.0 was adopted on December 13, 2005. The guidelines were almost 15 years old at the time of the 2020 Presidential Election and predated the very first iPhone by almost two years.
Technology has advanced more in that 15-year period, from flip phones to a device that can control every facet of our lives, but the EAC’s standards for voting equipment have changed minimally.
VVSG 2.0 was adopted in February 2021 and, as of November 2023, VVSG 1.0 and 1.1 are no longer used to certify voting systems.
However, according to the EAC website:
- VVSG 1.0 and 1.1 certified voting systems may continue to be used and do not need to be replaced by systems certified to VVSG 2.0, unless otherwise dictated by individual state statute.
While HAVA mandates the EAC “develop and maintain” the requirements, adherence by the states is voluntary, as the name suggests.
So was President Trump justified in firing an “independent” body that used the COVID-19 “pandemic” as an excuse to justify a three-year lapse in accreditation of just one of two testing labs and hadn’t updated its systems guidelines that predated the inception of the “smartphone”?
Or is this a President who fired the commissioners to “influence elections or to interfere with them to the benefit of himself and his party”?
The post Fired Democrat Elections Assistance Commission Board Member Breaks Silence on NPR Interview appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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