A person votes at a polling station in Manhattan during the New York presidential primary on April 2.
Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
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Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
A person votes at a polling station in Manhattan during the New York presidential primary on April 2.
Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
Elections in the United States are chronically underfunded.
It’s one of the few things that voting officials across the political spectrum agree on.
In Kentucky, for example, Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams said before he took office in 2020 that the state had not adjusted the amount it gave to counties to support elections since the 1980s.
“We had election materials that were about to be decertified,” Adams said. “We weren’t able to do the most basic things, like recounts.”
Estimates of exactly how much the country spends on democracy each year vary, but a recent report from MIT and the American Enterprise Institute found that local governments spend about the same amount to support voting as they do to maintain their parking lots.
So when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced last year that it would need part of a multibillion-dollar grant program to fund election security, much of the voting community rejoiced – even if it was only part of the money, many experts say. is ultimately necessary.
“This new funding has the potential to provide significant support to our guardians of democracy,” election experts Larry Norden and Derek Tisler of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time. “It is also a significant statement by the federal government that it understands that threats of physical violence against those who run our elections pose a threat to our democracy itself.”
But NPR has learned that in many cases, grant allocations have not gone as planned.
Several election officials and experts told NPR that at least some of the money was either not actually used to strengthen the country’s election infrastructure, or was spent haphazardly, without much thought about what was being spent. most necessary before a very controversial presidential election. Many voting officials fear for their safety.
“This money could be very important to buy basic things like electronic card access to make sure no one can access the voting machines, or bulletproof glass,” Norden said in an interview with NPR. “It’s disappointing that in some cases, election officials across the country didn’t feel like they got what they needed.”
A number of problems with 2023 election grants, including a “redirection” to the police
The money comes from an annual grant program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, intended to help state and local governments prepare for and prevent terrorism and disasters. For some grants, DHS designates priority areas to further target spending, and in 2023, the agency has designated election security as one of those priorities.
In total, in 2023, DHS has allocated more than $2 billion in preparedness grants, of which at least $30.9 million is expected to support election security.
It’s unclear how much of that money actually went to what voting officials in those places would have deemed effective, but it’s clear that at least a significant portion was not.
A state elections official told NPR that he was not consulted by his state’s emergency management coordinator before the money for election security was allocated, but rather was informed of how it would be spent just days before the grant application deadline. The official did not have permission to speak publicly, but spoke to NPR about his experience with the grant program on condition of anonymity.
After months of asking to be involved in the process, the week of the grant application deadline, the elections official said he joined a call with the emergency management coordinator at the statewide, which had outlined its plans for election security money.
The elections official was particularly struck by one element of the meeting: tens of thousands of dollars were to be spent on cybersecurity risk assessments for local governments.
The only problem?
These specific services are already offered free of charge to local governments by the federal government.
“They were completely duplicating things we could get for free,” the official said.
But when it was brought up, the emergency management official said it was too late to make changes to the money proposals.
One problem with rolling out the grants, according to several government sources interviewed by NPR, is that localities traditionally begin work on their DHS grant applications nearly a year before their deadline in the spring. But the federal government didn’t announce the election security requirement until late February, just months before the application deadline.
FEMA officials say they cannot issue guidance until grant amounts are determined by Congress and signed into law by the president.
The tight schedule coincided with the fact that grant applicants often don’t have a working relationship with local or state election administrators, says Kim Wyman, a former local elections official who worked on election security issues with the DHS until last year.
“Historically, these grants have been really focused on emergency management and law enforcement, so the people in these communities knew exactly when they were going out, how to apply, how to submit those applications,” Wyman said, now senior researcher at Bipartisan. Policy Center. “Whereas a number of poll workers were caught off guard because they had never seen them before and they weren’t aware of them.”
The elections official who spoke with NPR said it was clear that candidates in their states were trying to meet election security requirements without actually adjusting how the money was spent. Another line item involved a bomb training exercise that was supposed to benefit election security, but when asked which election officials were invited to the exercise, the emergency management official responded that ‘none.
“It was a redirection,” the poll official said. “They took federal money that was supposed to go toward election security and put it into policing.”
FEMA did not respond to NPR’s questions about the grants, but it’s clear the agency is aware of the problem.
A Government Accountability Office report released earlier this year highlighted the difficulty of implementing the new election security requirement.
In one case, a locality fulfilled its election security obligation by purchasing “a single security fence…which the recipient declared was limited to use only for election security purposes,” according to the GAO report.
The report’s authors spoke with 16 federal officials involved in distributing the grants and found that eight of them “had difficulty” meeting election security requirements. Among the reasons given for these problems were “lack of subject matter expertise” and “lack of regional need to resolve this problem”, which seems to imply that there was no need for funding for the election security in these places.
“It’s an absurd response,” said the official who spoke to NPR about his experience with the grant process. “What that tells me is that you didn’t try. You didn’t talk to anyone. You just sat there and waited for the phone to ring.”
Optimism about future improvements
A voter casts his ballot in the primary at a polling station in Atlanta on March 12.
Élie Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
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Élie Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, DHS announced that the total amount of preparedness grants for this year would be more than $1.8 billion, with a required spending of approximately $27.8 million for election security .
Generally speaking, officials and experts NPR spoke with expressed optimism that voting officials would be more involved this time.
“I think part of the reason for that is that this was the first time that this had happened. It happened a little late in the cycle. And so election officials weren’t always as involved that they should have been in developing the plan,” said Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice. “I suspect it’s going to be a little smoother this year, because everyone involved in this process will be more aware from the beginning that election officials need to be included in the process.”
The election official who spoke with NPR said this time they made a conscious effort to get local candidates involved in the grants before the deadline, but they weren’t sure if that would happen in other states .
Several experts, including Norden, said the grant rollout highlights a broader challenge for local elections officials: They never have a clear idea of when or how much additional money will come from the federal government; therefore difficult to plan.
Over the past six years, unrelated to DHS grants, Congress has allocated more than $400 million in some years and zero dollars in others. In 2024, lawmakers decided to spend $55 million on elections, a fraction of what many election experts say is needed each year.
“If we could have a consistent number that election officials could rely on, it would make planning a lot easier. And frankly, it would mean we wouldn’t be falling behind as we are now in the face of new challenges , whether it’s physical security or the artificial intelligence that election officials need to address,” Norden said. “I hope that this small amount of money, this $30 million (in DHS grant), will now be consistent. So election officials will know that it’s there. And again, even if it’s relatively small…it’s certainly better than nothing.”
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