MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Midterm elections are less than four months away. And a bipartisan agency that supports elections officials no longer has anyone to run it. President Trump fired two Democratic appointees to the Election Assistance Commission last week. A Republican resigned. There are no other commissioners left. Benjamin Hovland is one of those fired Democrats, and he's with us now. Mr. Hovland, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
BENJAMIN HOVLAND: Thanks for having me, Michel.
MARTIN: How did you find out about the dismissal? Did the administration provide any explanation?
HOVLAND: No. I received an email while I was waiting in the airport for a flight home.
MARTIN: Well, what did the email say, just thank you for your service, bye?
HOVLAND: Yes.
MARTIN: That's it.
HOVLAND: It was like, two sentences, and your service is no longer needed.
MARTIN: Any warning of this? Did you think this was coming?
HOVLAND: In some ways. Certainly, the Supreme Court's Slaughter decision from the previous week had - gives some indication that it may be. But other than that, no.
MARTIN: The decision which basically said that the president can fire independent agency individuals at will, except I think there was a carve-out for the Federal Reserve. So for people who've never heard of the Election Assistance Commission, could you just briefly describe what was your mandate?
HOVLAND: Absolutely. So the Election Assistance Commission was created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was Congress' response to the contentious 2000 election. And it charged the agency 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, because each state runs elections a little differently, being able to share that information to benefit all election administrators and voters.
MARTIN: Do you have a sense of how the loss of all the commissioners - I mean, the commission was set up intentionally to be bipartisan, two Democrats, two Republicans. One of the Republican members had previously resigned. The existing Republican commissioner was allowed to resign, as I understand it, and the two Democrats were fired. So, going forward, what will the commission do? Does it have any opportunity to or any ability to function without commissioners?
HOVLAND: So there's a great team there, there's a great staff in place, and they'll continue to do their work. The role of the commissioners was really to set policy and set the agenda for the agency going forward, and so certainly that will be impacted. There are the adoption of things like new voting system standards that can't happen without a quorum. So there are consequences. But again, much of the work of the agency I'm hopeful will continue because there's a great team in place that will continue to serve the state and local election officials around the country who actually run our elections.
MARTIN: Is it your sense, having done this work for quite some time, that elections officials across party lines benefited from the work of the commission?
HOVLAND: Absolutely. And so much of the work that we did was driven by a customer service mentality. We're not a regulatory agency. My colleagues would sometimes say assistance is our middle name. And so much of that was driven by the role, as the Help America Vote Act set us up, was to serve election officials. The state and local election officials across the country have a tremendously difficult job. That job has only gotten harder in recent years. And so while the agency, while the EAC is small, it has been doing what it can with the resources it has to try to make their lives a little easier, to try to share some of those best practices, to try to provide the support for those state and local election officials.
MARTIN: So many people who work on and study elections say or they believe that these firings are part of the president's efforts to influence elections or to interfere with them to the benefit of himself and his party. Do you think that that's true?
HOVLAND: 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.
MARTIN: OK. That's Benjamin Hovland. Until last week, he served as a commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission. Mr. Hovland, thank you so much for joining us.
HOVLAND: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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