We care about electoral integrity they said.... We care about illegal voting they said... Federal Election Commission Lacks Quorum After A Commissioner Resigns NPR's Audie Cornish talks with Dave Levinthal of the Center for Public Integrity, about a resignation that has led to a lack of quorum at the Federal Election Commission. The Federal Election Commission can't do its job. That's because one of its commissioners, Matthew Petersen, just resigned. It leaves the FEC with only three members instead of six, meaning they lack a quorum. And it's the latest challenge for the agency that's been hamstrung for more than a decade. Dave Levinthal is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity. He joins us in the studio to explain. LEVINTHAL: Commissioner Petersen, who's a Republican - he's been there for more than 11 years, and he hasn't given a specific reason as to why he is leaving. But he, along with the remaining commissioners - they've been there many, many years beyond the expiration of their individual terms. Now, the president of the United States, in conjunction with the U.S. Senate, are supposed to nominate and appoint new commissioners. And they largely have not done that for many years. This goes back to George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump. The ball is in his court. Basically, if you don't have four commissioners at the FEC, you can't do high-level business. And that means a lot of things. You can't conduct meetings. You can't enforce campaign finance laws. You can't punish anyone for breaking the law. And you can't create any new rules or regulations in order to make sure that all the political candidates and all the political action committees out there are abiding by the law as it's written. CORNISH: This was set up to be nonpartisan. Is there a bipartisan will to keep it functioning? LEVINTHAL: There really isn't at this point, and that's both internal and external. Internally, the FEC has been at loggerheads over many, many issues for many, many years. You have, on one side, conservatives who take a very laissez faire approach to campaign finance and believe that, hey, look. Speech is great for the country. And if people want to use money as speech and spend it as they see fit, they should have the right, generally speaking, to do so to a very significant degree. The Democrats out there - they feel very strongly that money plays too big a role in the way that American politics works right now and that we don't have a fair playing field in their estimation.
That's some heavy handed sarcasm there, easy to interpret. The fault lies in Congress and POTUS for not filling vacancies however.