Saving Dollars, Saving Democracy: Cost Savings for Local Election Officials through Voter Registration Modernization

Following the historic 2008 election, one lesson has been well learned:

The practices of local electionadministrators ultimately determine who is registered to vote and who is not, come Election Day. Election administrators are responsible for making the statutory requirement of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) a
reality in their county. They deal with the local-level hurdles, funding issues, and challenges inherent in attempting to register eligible citizens in their jurisdiction. Officials accept the registration forms from
public assistance agencies and Departments of Motor Vehicles, they administer data entry when third party groups and the Republican and Democratic parties submit forms, and they are responsible for sending accurate voter information to the state database.

The strong turnout of 2008 was only possible because millions of new voters were added to the rolls. This surge in voter registration occurred both as a result of extraordinary registration efforts by partisan campaigns, independent expenditure groups and non-partisan organizations, and because of the diligence of local officials in data-entering their information. While there is much to celebrate in the expanded participation of traditionally underrepresented groups – for example, 3.4 million more young voters than the previous election – it is also important to recognize the enormous obstacles and cost inefficiencies that occur in our current registration system.

Millions spent

U.S.PIRG Education Fund’s survey of 100 counties showed that over $33,467,910.00 of public money was spent on simple registration implementation and error-correction issues in 2008. That boils down to more than $86,977.00 of the elections budgets in counties with populations under 50,000. The average office in counties with 50,000 to 200,000 people spent $248,091.00. The average county elections office in jurisdictions of 200,000 to around one million people spent $1,079,610.00. Some of the largest counties in our survey spent far more than this average, for example St Louis County, with a population of 995,118, conservatively spent over 3 million dollars on registration implementation and issues in the 2008 cycle.

Additionally, these significant sums only reflect a portion of the costs election officials spend administering our outdated registration system.

Overtime pay, systems design costs, and outreach to citizens for registration are other significant costs not reflected in the already substantial money amounts uncovered by the report.

Moreover, our antiquated system has numerous ancillary effects on every piece of the election process which lead to further costs. One example of this can be seen in one of the largest counties in the country, Los Angeles County, California. In Los Angeles County due to the large population, the delay in entering information into the database system leads to an expense of over $56,000 in every major countywide election just to mail supplemental voter rosters to poll inspectors overnight. Election officials from coast to coast tell similar stories of being forced to apply inefficient, expensive band-aids in order to effectively administer the system.