The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA).

The General Services Administration distributed most of the $650 million permitted under Title I of HAVA, and the remainder was earmarked for the EAC to disburse.

On December 6, 2006 Caroline Hunter and Rosemary E. Rodriguez were nominated by President George W. Bush to replace Ray Martinez and Paul DeGregorio.

Specifically, Representative Gregg Harper introduced a bill to windup the EAC and transfer some of its functions to the Federal Election Commission.

[5] The EAC did not regain a quorum until December 16, 2014, when the U.S. Senate confirmed three Commissioners, Thomas Hicks, Matthew V. Masterson, and Christy McCormick.

The Help America Vote Act specifies that four commissioners are nominated by the President on recommendations from the majority and minority leadership in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

Prior to the EAC, Wilkey served a four-year term as the executive director of the New York State Board of Elections beginning in 2003.

The Office of the Inspector General is tasked with detecting and preventing fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of EAC programs, regularly performing audits and evaluations.

[16] (see a full list of TGDC members) Critics have contended that the EAC has responded positively to political pressure from the Republican Party and the Department of Justice.

[17] Tova Wang, a consultant to the Commission, wrote a detailed account in The Washington Post about how her research and that of her Republican co-author had been disregarded or altered by the EAC, to produce a published report "that completely stood our own work on its head."

[20][21] In 2019, an article in Politico reported that Newby had been the subject of extensive criticism from within and without the agency since his hiring in 2015, culminating in multiple calls for his resignation from Democratic members of the House and the Senate.

[22] Anonymous sources reported that Newby played a large role in many EAC staffers leaving, including the departure of Ryan Macias, the acting director of election testing and certification, as well as his predecessor, Brian Hancock.

In February 2016, Newby approved requests from three states to change state-specific instructions on the NVRA federal form related to proof of citizenship for voter registration.

These states required proof of citizenship by state law, a controversial policy being pushed by conservative GOP members such as Kris Kobach of Kansas, that would be used in support of Donald Trump's widely discredited claim that millions of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 presidential election and had denied Trump a majority in the popular vote.

The VVSG 2.0 represents a significant advancement in defining standards that improves cybersecurity, accessibility, and usability requirements, while also introducing various audit methods supporting software independence to confirm the accuracy of the vote and increase voter confidence.

In February 1975 an interagency agreement was formed with General Accounting Office’s Office of Federal Elections (predecessor to the Federal Election Commission) and the National Bureau of Standards (predecessor to the National Institute of Standards and Technology) resulting in a March 1975 report, Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote-Tallying,[28] authored by Roy Saltman.

This report highlighted "the lack of appropriate technical skills at the State and local level for developing or implementing written standards, against which voting system hardware and software could be evaluated."

[29] In July 1984 the FEC armed with congressionally appropriated funds began a six-year task of creating the first national performance and test standards for punchcard, marksense, and direct recording electronic voting systems.

The national testing effort was overseen by NASED’s Voting Systems Board, which is composed of election officials and independent technical advisors.

NASED established a process for vendors to submit their equipment to an Independent Test Authority (ITA) for evaluation against the Standards.