This article is by Bill Theobald in The Fulcrum:

Nine months from an intensely contested presidential election already clouded by anxiety about the integrity of the results, the main federal agency overseeing the process is struggling to get back on its feet after years in turmoil.

The Election Assistance Commission is unknown to most Americans. But it certifies the reliability of the machines most voters will use this fall, and it’s at the epicenter of efforts to protect our election systems from being hacked by foreign adversaries.

And since last fall it’s been without an executive director or general counsel to coordinate the government’s limited supervision over how states and thousands of localities plan for the 2020 balloting. In fact, none of eight top officials listed on the agency website in March 2017, when the extent of Russian interference in the last presidential election was just becoming clear, are still with the agency. Neither are eight of the other 16 staff members who worked there then. And years of budget cuts have only recently started to be reversed.

Read the article here.