As Covid-19 Drives Up Election Costs For Strapped Counties, More Than 2,500 Jurisdictions Apply For Zuckerberg Funded Grants

Election 2020 is less than two weeks away and between expanded mail-in voting, early voting and the cost of retrofitting voting centers, the presidential election is likely to be one of the most expensive yet. And who’s responsible for it? Hint: not the feds.

The federal government and states do set aside funding to help pay for elections. But it’s our nation’s 3,069 counties, parishes and boroughs that are instrumental in providing key funding, overseeing polling places and coordinating poll workers. During the 2016 general election, counties oversaw more than 100,000 polling places and coordinated more than 700,000 poll workers.

Elections are costly. One estimate by MIT’s Elections Lab pins the cost at $10 per voter or at about $1 billion for the entire country. Since counties are responsible for administering elections, they are responsible for funding the majority of these costs and COVID-19 has driven the bill up significantly. An estimate earlier this year from the Brennan Center found that the pandemic could add more than $2 billion nationwide to the total election cost this year.

In many cases, administering elections will cost counties more than twice the usual amount this year — at the same time they’re bracing for a collective $202 billion hit to their budgets over two years.

Here are a few examples from around the country:

Texas

Just south of Austin, Travis County has transformed 37 sites including gyms, meeting rooms and event centers, into early voting locations where social distancing can be achieved. Sanitation stations have also been set up at each voting center for poll workers and voters.

County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir reported that the county has set aside nearly $7 million because of all the extras. Normally a presidential election would cost about $2.2 million.

Pennsylvania

Dauphin County is spending $675,000 more, York County is spending roughly $400,000 more, Perry County is spending $30,000 more and Cumberland County is spending more than $91,000 on printing, close to double what they spent in 2016.

”We had to hire additional staff, we had to get more equipment, we had to get more postage and more paper,” said Dauphin County Commissioner Mike Pries told the local CBS news affiliate this week. “A lot more is going on to this election than ever before.”

New Jersey

One statewide estimate puts the total cost of mail-in balloting this year at more than $3 million — and that’s just to send out the ballots. If those ballots are filled out and returned by 4 million people, about the expected turnout in a presidential election, the additional cost would total about $2.2 million.

Maryland

Not only will counties spend more on mail-in balloting this year, Gov. Larry Hogan’s requirement that counties first mail voters a form to request their mail-in ballot has added unnecessary time and expense. The State Board of Elections estimates that it will cost up to $5.6 million to prepare and mail ballot applications, with the return postage alone costing up to $3 million.

Without state resources to offset these large expenses, the Maryland Association of Counties warns the order represents a significant unfunded mandate on local governments. The association is asking the state to bear the full burden of the costs.

What is Congress doing?

The Brennan Center in a follow up to its own report, recommended that Congress allocate $4 billion to ensure safe and fair elections this year. But so far, Congress has increased Help America Vote Act funding by $425 million via a provision in the CARES Act. That more than doubled the available federal funding for Election 2020 to more than $800 million, but that’s still less than one-quarter of the recommended amount.

Private groups are getting into the fray, which raises questions about political partisanship. Most notably, Facebook

FB
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been the primary supporter for grants given out to counties by the Chicago-based nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan donated another $100 million to CTCL, raising their support for the group to $350 million. (The also gave another $50 million for election infrastructure to the  Center for Election Innovation & Research). CTCL has received grant applications from more than 2,500 local election jurisdictions to help pay for the 2020 elections.

Overall, however, ensuring a fair and safe election is just one more cost that counties are shouldering in a pandemic that has highlighted the critical role these local governments play in our lives.