Democracy Is Priceless, but Elections Cost Big Bucks: How much exactly? No one seems to know.

• Author: Underhill, Wendy
• Position: ELECTIONS

The usual estimate for running a presidential election is $2 billion to $3 billion nationwide. That's not counting the costs of campaigns or all the nongovernmental funding associated with registering voters and getting them to the polls; those expenditures are strictly voluntary. It's a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate as to what local jurisdictions and states spend to put on a major election.

In 2020, the cost was higher than usual as COVID-19 required election officials to find larger venues to avoid crowding, double down on cleanliness, provide protective gear, print far more absentee ballots than ever before--and acquire the ballot-counting equipment to process them. While the equipment will last for years, the invoices all came due in a matter of months.

Because of the pandemic, the federal government pitched in with $400 million in grants to the states for election administration. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, provided similar funding directly to local election offices as a onetime assist. Put it all together, and the cost of election administration in 2020 might have been closer to $4 billion.

No Strings Attached

States can't--and many would rather not--rely on philanthropy to fund democracy. In 2021, 11 states enacted laws prohibiting election officials from accepting contributions to stem concerns that there could be coercion, or the appearance of coercion, attached to those funds. Besides, what could be a more quintessential governmental responsibility than running elections?

"Philanthropic donations and pleas for federal funds were the hot topics in election administration budgeting in 2020," says Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Yet in the long term, we know that financial support for election administrators will continue to depend on appropriations from state legislatures and local governments."

As for federal funding, states are likely to appreciate more of it, so long as strings aren't attached that could dictate policy choices that traditionally fall to state lawmakers. The history of federal injections of money has been short and sporadic. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act provided about $3 billion to the states for upgrades to registration and voting systems, which was expended over the course of a dozen years. In 2018, $380 million was added to the pot. And then there...