Editorial: The high cost of safe elections
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Safe elections mean something to America.
The freedom of the vote is something people have fought and died to achieve and to protect.
We look back on the periods when people couldn’t vote because of race or gender or the simple fact they didn’t own land, and we shake our heads in consternation. We recall the corruption of New York’s Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed’s “vote early and vote often” policy the way we do shameful truths we don’t want to repeat.
American worship at the sacred shrine of a fair voting process helped build the way international organizations monitor and observe elections worldwide.
So it should bother us that a new report says the 2020 presidential election needs a lot of help to happen fairly.
“Ensuring Safe Elections: Federal Funding Needs for State and Local Governments During the Pandemic” was released Thursday, authored in part by Christopher Deluzio, policy director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Cyber Law, Policy and Security.
The federal pandemic response bill directed $400 million toward higher election costs in the time of coronavirus restrictions — such as postage for mail-in votes, protection for poll workers and education for voters. According to the report, that amount is far too little to make our biggest day at the ballot box as secure as necessary.
Pennsylvania got $14.2 million, which is nothing to sneeze at. However, let’s start looking at it merely as a slice of the overall pie. That money represents 3.55% of the whole $400 million. Pennsylvania’s population is 3.9% of the nation.
Then there is the state’s relative importance in the 2020 election. Anyone and everyone running the Electoral College numbers is aware of the weight of Pennsylvania’s importance. We may have fewer votes than California and Texas, but those states are considered permanently stained blue and red respectively.
Pennsylvania, however, is on a short list of key swing states and has more votes on the table than others like Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin. That doesn’t make a ballot in Pennsylvania more important than one in Alabama, but for the good of every American vote, it might make it more critical to protect.
The new report says the total price tag of Pennsylvania’s election is as much as $90 million. What might be the most important aspect, however, is who pays that bill.
According to the data, the state’s costs for the election will be about $17.5 million-$17.9 million of that. The state — specifically the Department of State — is the shot-caller in the election game. It oversees the process, voter registration and more.
But the majority of the heavy lifting — $61.6 million-$72.2 million — falls on the shoulders of the counties that actually make the elections happen.
The report says just five studied and key states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio — will need an additional $414 million to cover the increased costs of an election process that has already been delayed and mutated through the primary cycle and will likely include more changes by November. That is $14 million more than allotted for the whole country. Pennsylvania’s April 28 primary has been moved to June 2.
Sure, everything would be easier and better with more money as we deal with the pandemic. Enough money could make people not scared. It could protect jobs and homes and lives. But we can’t just make enough money to do everything we want to do appear from thin air.
If we are prioritizing things, however, the importance of the elections can’t be underestimated. And it shouldn’t be shortchanged.