The Trump administration plotted ways to bypass an election agency before firing its leaders, according to reporting by Reuters.
According to four anonymous sources who spoke to Reuters, the White House “spent months” mulling ways around Election Assistance Commission guidelines for state voting machines. Earlier this week, Trump fired two Democratic members of the commission and allowed its lone Republican commissioner to resign just months before the midterms.
Some Trump White House officials wanted the EAC to add a proof-of-citizenship requirement for the national mail voter registration form. Others, as far back as last fall, considered whether to declare a national emergency, according to Reuters.
The idea of declaring a national emergency came from a recommendation by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The emergency declaration would be followed by the creation of a federal task force that would compel states to address vulnerabilities in their voting systems, sources told Reuters.
Reuters noted that the report with those recommendations was never published, and the ODNI did not respond to a request for comment. However, two sources told Reuters that complaints about the commission continued since those recommendations came up last fall.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, ODNI, and the White House also met with EAC leaders around the same time to discuss flaws in voting machines that they believed “could have contributed to abnormalities in 2020,” sources told Reuters.
According to Reuters, the Trump administration has not made it immediately clear why it ousted the last remaining heads of the EAC, but Reuters’ sources say that the administration was “frustrated” with how slowly the commissioners were updating voting machine guidelines.
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