When a global pandemic threatened to throw the 2020 presidential election into chaos, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed to state and local election agencies to ensure they had the resources to conduct a fair and accessible election, ultimately allowing administrators to manage record turnout with relatively few hiccups.
Two years later, that money is gone and while the pandemic has ebbed it has not disappeared, and new challenges have arisen, including rising security threats, supply-chain disruptions and escalating costs for basic materials such as paper ballots, which have gone up by as much as 50 percent around the country, according to some estimates.
Election officials and voting experts are now warning as the midterm elections get underway that new funding is needed to avoid significant problems in November.
“The scale of the need is in literally the tens of billions of dollars,” said Tianna Epps-Johnson, executive director of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that distributed more than $300 million in grants to election agencies in 2020, funded by donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
If Congress does not act quickly, “there will be gaps that could have a really negative impact on election departments’ ability to administer a safe and secure process this November,” she added. “That’s how you end up with lines that wrap around city blocks.”
But lawmakers and the private donors who stepped up in 2020 appear increasingly likely to remain on the sidelines as election administration has evolved over the past two years into a fiercely partisan issue, thanks largely to unfounded attacks on the last election from former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies. Meanwhile, Democrats’ year-long push for national voting rights legislation failed in the Senate last month, leaving the party without a clear path to close the funding gaps….
Among the more concerning forces is a crunch in the supply chain for paper, which is needed for ballots, mail-voting envelopes, voter registration forms and more. The cost of paper has gone up by as much as 50 percent around the country, multiple election officials and paper suppliers said — a consequence of timber mills shuttering due to pandemic-related worker shortages, as well as the conversion of many mills to produce cardboard boxes for online retailers.https://07f941e6510e2e0bf88da9818fcaf431.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
On top of that, the demand for mail voting exploded with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, creating a need for vastly more envelopes, mail-ballot applications and printed instructions. While many state and local election officials have said that, so far this year, they have managed to procure the paper products they need to run their upcoming primaries, it has not been without an added outlay of cash. The higher volume of mail ballots has also vastly increased local postage costs, officials said.
Other financial pressures include the need to offer more competitive pay to election workers to fill a growing field of vacancies at a time when threats to election workers have hit all-time highs. The still-spreading belief that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud, including unsubstantiated allegations that tabulating machines were hacked and programmed to throw the results to President Biden, has also caused a surge in demand for new election equipment….
Meanwhile, it is unclear — at best — whether there will be a significant pool of private money to dole out this year as there was in 2020. At least 10 states have moved since then to ban elections agencies from accepting private grants, with several more states considering bans this year. The Zuckerberg-Chan funding, in particular, quickly became a target of Republicans who claimed the grants were funneled to heavily Democratic cities and counties and gave Biden an unfair advantage in the 2020 election.
Epps-Johnson, whose group distributed the funds, did not dispute outside analyses that showed CTCL’s grants went disproportionately to Democratic jurisdictions. But, she said, that reflected where the requests for funding came from, not any bias on the part of her organization. She also noted that the states that have restricted private philanthropy have not generally provided any new public funding to replace it.
“We made our grant funding available to every election department that applied,” she said, adding, “Our position from the very beginning has been it’s not an ideal situation for private philanthropy to be the funding source for election administration — election departments and voters deserve predictable, robust federal funding of elections.”
While Epps-Johnson said CTCL is “committed to continuing to have election officials backs” in 2022 and beyond, it appears unlikely that Zuckerberg and Chan will repeat their massive spending. Asked about their future commitments, a family spokeswoman pointed to Zuckerberg’s 2020 statements on the funding “where he discusses how this was a one-time effort due to the pandemic.”