Elections need more funds, officials and advocates warn, but Congress dithers, and some states may ban donors

"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," Mike DeBonis and Amy Gardner report for The Washington Post. "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 departments need tens of billions of dollars to ensure safe and fair elections, said Tiana Epps-Johnson, executive director of the Center for Tech and Civic Life. CTCL is a nonpartisan nonprofit funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that gave out more than $300 million in grants to election agencies in 2020.

"With a new round of funding in doubt, Epps-Johnson is among those calling for a major new federal infusion of election cash and warning that shortfalls could mean fewer polling places, reduced access to early voting or mail ballots, delayed security upgrades and other setbacks — even in states that have embraced expanding voter access, let alone those that have moved since 2020 to restrict it," DeBonis and Gardner report. "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, largely because of unfounded attacks on the last election from former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies," DeBonis and Gardner report. "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."

A bill moving in Kentucky would ban counties from accepting grants like they did in 2020, Austin Horn reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Zuckerberg-backed nonprofits gave at least $7.1 million to Kentucky county clerks and $1.6 million to the State Board of Elections in 2020, according to lobbyist Bryan Sunderland, who was a staffer in then-Gov. Matt Bevin's Republican administration.

Sunderland said banning such grants would protect elections against private interests, but Jason Denny, the clerk in rural Anderson County, said the $10,000 from CTCL "was much-needed and led to the highest turnout of any county in the state," Horn reports. Denny used the money for drive-up polls.

"In a perfect world, elections would be fully funded. They have not been," Denny told Horn. "During 2020, we saw a different style of an election. … We as county clerks were able to work through this and pull off a nearly perfect election, one of the smoothest-run elections that Kentucky’s ever seen."