Notes from the Field — July 11, 2026
By the second week of July, the federal government’s only agency built to run elections had nobody in the room. Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were fired. Christy McCormick was allowed to resign. The Election Assistance Commission — a four-member board Congress designed so no party could ever hold more than two seats — was down to zero.
That design wasn’t an accident. Congress built the EAC this way in 2002, after Bush v. Gore, specifically so no single administration could run it alone. For twenty-four years, that structure held. It held right up until the Supreme Court, weeks earlier, decided a case that had nothing to do with elections at all.
In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court overturned a ninety-year-old precedent and ruled that presidents can remove heads of independent agencies — the case was about the FTC. Whether that logic reaches a bipartisan-balance agency like the EAC was, legally, still an open question. The administration didn’t wait to find out. “The EAC has been a dead man walking since the Slaughter decision,” one former agency official told CNN — since the decision, not since any finding of neglect or malfeasance, the only grounds the old rule allowed.
This is not the first time this White House has tried to move the EAC. An earlier executive order directing it to add proof-of-citizenship requirements to federal voter forms was blocked in court — multiple judges found the president lacked unilateral authority to order it. Losing that fight didn’t end the goal. It just changed the method. You don’t need to win the rule change if you can empty the chair of everyone who’d enforce the old one. The commission cannot lawfully make any decision affecting how Americans vote until it has commissioners again — and only the president nominates them.
The same summer produced the same move at the FTC and the EEOC. The pattern is the same. The speed is not.
Power does not require conspiracy. It only requires that the people in the room share a common interest in the outcome. This time, the interest was simpler than usual: there is no room. Nine months before a midterm election, the agency that certifies the machines nobody wanted to end up in a courtroom over already has.
The gear keeps turning as long as one fact stays true: no bipartisan-structured agency has yet forced a court to say the Slaughter removal power stops at its door.
This is Essay 3’s argument, documented in real time.
Essay 3 — The People in the Room
Broken Frames — Block 9: The Darkened Room (not yet published — thebrokenframes.substack.com/s/broken-frames)
Copyright 2026 — Steve Sagnotti
Sources: Votebeat, “Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act,” July 9, 2026. CNN, “Trump fires Election Assistance Commission leaders,” July 9, 2026. Democracy Docket, “In sweeping attack on elections, Trump fires leadership of key federal voting assistance commission,” July 2026. The Guardian, “Trump accused of trying to ‘rig’ elections after firing federal commissioners,” July 10, 2026. DW.com, “Trump looked to bypass federal election agency, report says,” July 11, 2026. Election Law Blog, “Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members,” July 9, 2026.
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