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[Image courtesy of lindsredding]

Four years(!) after their nominations by President Obama, two prospective new members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission are one step closer to serving on the embattled agency after a committee vote yesterday. UC-Irvine’s Rick Hasen had this press release from the Senate Rules Committee:

SCHUMER ANNOUNCES ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION NOMINEES THOMAS HICKS AND MYRNA PÉREZ CLEAR SENATE RULES COMMITTEE

WASHINGTON, DC- U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, announced today that Thomas Hicks and Myrna Pérez, nominees to the Election Assistance Commission, have been reported out to the full Senate. Both nominees were reported out of the Rules Committee by voice vote on April 9, 2014. The nominees will now be placed on the Senate’s Executive Calendar. The Rules Committee held a hearing on the nominations of Thomas Hicks and Myrna Pérez on December 11, 2013.

Mr. Hicks is the Senior Elections Counsel on the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration since 2003, where he oversees all Committee matters relating to Federal elections and campaign finance. Prior to that, he was a Policy Analyst for Common Cause, a non-profit, public advocacy organization working in support of election and campaign finance reform. He also previously served as a Special Assistant in the Office of Congressional Relations at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. He received his J.D. from the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, and his B.A. in Government from Clark University (Worcester, MA).

Ms. Pérez is currently an adjunct professor and the Director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she has worked and published on a variety of voting rights issues. Previously, Ms. Pérez was the Civil Rights Fellow at Relman, Dane, and Colfax, a civil rights law firm in Washington, DC, and served as a policy analyst at the United States Government Accountability Office. Ms. Pérez is the recipient of several awards, including the Puerto Rican Bar Association Award for Excellence in Academia and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Public Service and is a past Chair of the Election Law Committee of the City of New York Bar Association. She clerked for Judge Anita B. Brody of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and for Judge Julio M. Fuentes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Ms. Pérez holds a B.A. from Yale College, an M.P.P. from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.

The next step, obviously, is for the nominees to get a vote on the Senate floor – a much simpler (but still complicated) task for the chamber’s Democratic majority in a post-filibuster Senate. If that happens, the agency will be at half-strength but will have a non-zero number of commissioners for the first time in years.

What does this mean? It isn’t clear, but here are a series of possibilities:

+ Democrats want someone other than EAC staff to be representing the agency’s position on the proof-of-citizenship litigation against Kansas and Arizona that is currently heading toward an appeal;

+ The Administration sees a half-strength EAC as better than nothing in efforts to implement the recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration;

+ A broader debate on elections and voting rights is heating up in the wake of recent Supreme Court cases and Democrats want the EAC to be a part of the conversation about the role of election administration in advancing these goals; and

+ [Least likely but I’ve been wrong – often! – before] Republicans have identified a pair of EAC nominees to join Hicks and Pérez and bring the agency back to full strength.

If nothing else, yesterday’s committee action moves the status of the EAC to a different place than it’s been for years. Here’s hoping it’s a good place … because sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train 🙂

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