A Third Strike for Obama at the EAC

Yesterday, President Obama nominated Kate Marshall to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). A brief review of his previous nominations seems to be in order. All too often the Democrats consider election administration in a partisan fashion, seeking to advance a political agenda or scare their base.  

President Obama seemingly believed such when he nominated the hyper-partisan liberal extremist Myrna Perez previously.  As we wrote at the time:

It is hard to imagine a person less suited for a commission whose job is to be “independent, bipartisan commission charged with developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements” than Ms. Perez.  Some of the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA’s, requirements were for states to update their voting rolls.  An effort which Ms. Perez has long opposed calling such efforts “list purging” with made up statistics and overheated rhetoric.  An example of the latter is Ms. Perez once said: “purging happens all across the country, probably every day.” 

To election officials of both parties that statement is ridiculous but it is the kind of extremist rhetoric that Ms. Perez has been spouting for years against Republicans and Democrats who try to enforce laws on voting that the far left opposes.  In Ms. Perez’s world such Republicans and Democrats are racists or fear mongers. 

According to Perez, Secretaries of State and other election officials spend their time trying to remove people from the voting rolls.  Such rhetoric and her extreme partisanship resulted in Perez being forced to withdraw her name.  

President Obama replaced Perez's nomination with Matthew Butler. Butler was the former CEO of Media Matters. While Perez was a partisan extremist on election issues, Butler had no experience at all on election issues.  He is now the Chief of Staff for the Democratic National Convention. In other words, he was only a partisan.  

Which brings us to the current nominee, Kate Marshall. She similarly has no election administration background. (Although unlike Butler, at least she "applied" for such a position when she ran unsuccessfully for Nevada Secretary of State.)

And that is how the Democrats view the EAC: a place to reward partisans for their service to the liberal movement. It is sad that the left has so little regard for election administration.