But now, more than a year later, the politics that surround election funding have changed dramatically, though the need for modernizing and securing election systems has not. Conservatives, angry and suspicious that Facebook and Silicon Valley tilted the scales to help Democrats, have moved to ban future philanthropic donations for elections. In Wisconsin, a special counsel appointed by Republicans released an interim report
accusing Zuckerberg of breaking bribery laws with the grants.
More than a dozen Republican-controlled states, including
Georgia,
Florida and
Arizona, have passed new restrictions on private donations to election offices since November 2020, and more states
are currently drafting similar legislation. Absent new sources of government funding, these bans could yield cuts to election locations and election workers in the midterms.
In its recently passed $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, Congress included just $75 million for election security. That’s a fraction of what lawmakers authorized in 2020 and an amount experts say is nowhere near sufficient to address the needs ahead of the next election.
At the center of this failure is the Brennan Center, an influential liberal think tank and advocacy organization. Based in New York City, the Brennan Center rarely gets public scrutiny, but it plays an outsize role in the strategic direction of the movement pushing for voting rights and election reform. That flows partly from its massive war chest, which has skyrocketed over the last decade: Between 2010 and 2020, its net earnings grew from
$196,000 to
$58 million. Its assets jumped from $8 million to $90 million.
That financial firepower, coupled with the credibility in Washington that it has built over the years, gives the Brennan Center effective veto power over the voting rights advocacy coalition it leads. In Congress, revisions to election and voting laws are often met with the question, “What does the Brennan Center think?”
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Many local election leaders have struggled to understand why the Brennan Center — a group with the ear of influential Democrats in Congress — dropped prioritization of election funding over the last year, particularly after helping elevate their concerns during the pandemic. Moreover, while the Freedom to Vote Act would push many election reforms that are needed and overdue, those changes would not come cheap. Advocates worried that chaos could come from a slew of new unfunded mandates.
Jessica Huseman, one of the country’s leading voting rights journalists, detailed many of these concerns publicly
last spring in a Daily Beast op-ed. The For the People Act “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows,” Huseman wrote, noting that it was packed with deadlines and obligations that would be impossible for election officials to meet. “The sections of the bill related to voting systems … show remarkably little understanding of the problems the authors apply alarmingly prescriptive solutions to.”
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Throughout July, as Senate Democrats prepared their $3.5 trillion social spending request, lawmakers assured state and local election officials that their proposal would include billions for election funding. A Politico story
published just four days before the package was unveiled confirmed that lawmakers were eyeing as much as $15 to $20 billion for that purpose and felt confident that they could deliver, even as their voting rights bill remained stalled.
But at the eleventh hour the funding was pulled, at the urging of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had “abruptly” changed her mind, as Huseman reported
in a detailed ticktock of the negotiations. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., the author of the For the People Act, had convinced Pelosi that authorizing election funding would reduce their leverage to pass his bill, the same argument the Brennan Center used to justify not signing the coalition letter.
Leading negotiations in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was angry. She felt blindsided by Pelosi’s move, per Huseman’s sources, even as spokespersons for both House leaders defended the last-minute cuts. The spokespersons told Huseman that election funding would require more “safeguards” to ensure it couldn’t be used for voter suppression, but top federal elections experts say there is no history of misspending those funds. “After all,” Huseman wrote, “it costs far less money to close polling locations and remove drop boxes, and state legislatures across the country have been doing this without any additional spending since the 2020 election.” (Klobuchar, Pelosi, and Sarbanes did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment for this story.)
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Advocates were heard, sort of. On Monday, Biden released his 2023 budget and called for $10 billion over the next decade for election infrastructure upgrades — half of what activists requested. While
hailed as a positive step, it offers no guarantees: Congress often ignores presidential budget asks.
Meanwhile, as the voting rights package remains in limbo, the new year has brought momentum to the issue of addressing election subversion, or the threat that the true winner of an election will not be declared the winner. While many defenses against election subversion happen
at the state and local level, from a federal standpoint lawmakers could make tweaks to an 1887 statute known as the Electoral Count Act, which governs the end stages of a presidential election. At present, the Electoral Count Act could allow Congress to object to counting votes from a state, and it is also vague on the responsibilities of a vice president in counting electoral votes. McConnell has suggested that he’s open to
tweaking the law, and a bipartisan group of senators have been meeting to discuss
a path forward.
