The embattled executive director of the Election Assistance Commission, whose tenure has been marked by internal turmoil, will not serve another term, two government employees with knowledge of the decision told POLITICO.

While the departure of Brian Newby will remove a controversial figure from one of the federal agencies charged with helping states secure their election systems, the shakeup will likely further hamper its mission ahead of the 2020 election, which intelligence officials say hackers working for Russia and other U.S. adversaries will once again attempt to disrupt.

EAC commissioners voted over the weekend of Sept. 7-8 not to reappoint Newby for four more years, according to an agency staffer and a House aide, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. The commissioners also voted not to retain Cliff Tatum, the agency’s general counsel. Both men joined the EAC on Oct. 22, 2015.

The vote on the two appointments was 2-2, splitting the Democratic and Republican commissioners, said the House aide. A decision to reappoint them would have required a majority.

The vote came three months after a POLITICO story about how Newby has faced extensive criticism from inside and outside the EAC for undermining its election security work and ignoring, micromanaging and mistreating staff.

The commissioners’ decision means that the EAC will need to replace its top two staffers just months before the first 2020 presidential primaries. (Job postings are expected in the next few weeks, the House aide said.)

As executive director, Newby supervises the career staff and serves as the intermediary between them and the EAC’s four presidentially appointed commissioners. But since his arrival, POLITICO reported, he has alienated and confused his workforce, leading to a staff exodus that included nine office directors.

Newby “was a major factor in the majority of the people that have left … since he got there,” a former government employee told POLITICO in June.

Despite losing his current job, Newby may not be done at the EAC. According to the House aide and the EAC staffer, he is maneuvering to stay at the agency in another role.

As executive director, Newby can create and implement a succession plan that would give him a new role with the commissioners’ permission. He has suggested a plan to this effect, said these two people. But according to the House aide, the commissioners are unlikely to approve it “due to concerns about self-dealing.”

Democratic commissioner Thomas Hicks has proposed an alternate plan that would designate EAC staffer Mark Abbott, who coordinates the distribution of federal grant money to states, as interim executive director, according to these two people. Abbott is “competent and well respected,” the House aide said. But Hicks’ plan would also require a majority vote.

An EAC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the reappointment vote or future plans.

House Administration Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the EAC needed stable and trusted leadership as the country prepared for the 2020 election.

“Unfortunately, serious personnel mismanagement and occasional hyper-partisanship by executive leadership at the Commission has too often distracted from their mission,” Lofgren told POLITICO in a statement. “I am glad that the EAC has committed to new leadership, and it is important they now act swiftly to ensure the Commission has the necessary personnel in place to ensure our nation’s elections are secure and free from interference.”

The vote to dismiss Newby and Tatum, conducted via email, marked a defeat for EAC Chairwoman Christy McCormick, who brokered the deal to hire them.

Multiple people who have spoken with POLITICO about the turmoil at the EAC have described Newby as a McCormick loyalist who was too deferential to the chairwoman, a Republican who spent years denying the reality of Russian interference in the 2016 election. (The sources declined to speak on the record to preserve professional relationships.)

In recent months, McCormick appeared poised to reward Newby for his support. She repeatedly told lawmakers that the agency couldn’t begin a formal search process for Newby’s replacement until his term expired. People familiar with the agency told POLITICO that, when that happened, she would tell her colleagues that it was too risky to lose Newby and wait out a lengthy search process.

The EAC’s founding statute, the Help America Vote Act, does not explicitly prohibit a search process before a vacancy. But the EAC official in charge of interpreting the law is Tatum, the general counsel, who presumably also wanted McCormick’s support for reappointment.

McCormick “insisted” on voting on both Newby and Tatum’s reappointment at the same time, the House aide said. “I guess the idea is that, if they lose a Republican, they have to lose a Democrat, too.”

The commissioners discussed the reappointment issue in late August when they traveled to Orlando, Fla., for an annual conference of election administrators, according to the House aide.

Newby, who formerly supervised elections in Johnson County, Kan., joined the agency after a turbulent tenure in the Sunflower State. In late 2016, the Associated Press revealed that he had carried on an affair with a subordinate, “berated employees” and “deliberately bypassed supervision” in Johnson County.

Newby may be best known for one of his first major acts at the EAC, when he approved several conservative states’ requests to require residents filling out the federal voter registration form to prove their citizenship. The decision, which a federal appeals court blocked, set off alarm bells within the EAC and led many election officials to distrust him, four sources said.

While Newby’s departure will hearten many in the elections community, it will also create a significant void that, if left unfilled, will hinder the agency’s mission at a critical moment.

Among the EAC’s responsibilities are testing voting equipment to see if it meets federal guidelines, distributing guidance to local officials and conducting nationwide surveys of election technology and practices.

Although DHS provides the bulk of the federal government’s technical support to state and local election officials, the EAC has deeper, longer-term relationships with those officials. When DHS first waded into election security in 2016, anxious local officials saw the EAC as a trusted partner and a safe haven for their concerns.