Center for Tech and Civic Life executive director Tiana Epps-Johnson joined the Battleground Podcast this week to discuss the need for federal funding for local election officials. 

Listen to the Podcast here!

Key quotes:

Yes, election departments are infrastructure:

“So, as I mentioned before, the Department of Homeland Security named elections to be critical infrastructure. There’s just a handful of things that are designated critical infrastructure that are so important to protect because of our national security, that we have to pay close attention to making sure that they are bolstered. And from our perspective, we have to actually follow up with investing in elections like they are critical infrastructure and we haven’t so far. And so what that looks like is, many folks voting on equipment that was purchased before the iPhone was even invented….”

The need for funding is real…

“Someone said if they had additional funding in the future, they would purchase a lot and build a new election office. ‘We are currently in the basement of an old jail, and it leaks terribly when it rains. It’s a health hazard during early voting. There are many other safety issues, but our county doesn’t have the funds to buy a new building.’ That is the type of facilities that election departments are using right now to do this load-buried work of democracy. We have to invest in our elections in a more long-term, more robust way, and we have to do it now.”

Where we go from here:

“When I think about the future of election administration, I’m not hearkening back to a time in my mind when it worked amazingly before. I think there’s two reasons for that. One of the big challenges has always been this decentralization. The second part is that elections today just are not like they have been in the past. Again, because a lot of those reasons that I shared, there are so many new complexities because of technology or different demands on election departments that we can’t really look at it compared necessarily to the past. But what we do know is that the last major investment from the federal government to election departments was about 20 years ago.”

“…The best-case scenario to my mind is that during the process that Congress is in right now, as they are considering investments in infrastructure, that they follow the call that we along with election officials and city officials and state officials across the country are making. And that is for a $20 billion investment in election infrastructure that is available to election departments over the next 10 years, funding to let them modernize their voter registration systems, funding to allow them to invest in facilities and security, funding to just actually pull our democracy into the 21st century so that no one is working on a Windows 7 machine anymore.”    

Local funding means voters don’t get equal funding for elections:

“….There are election departments that are spending $2 per registered voter to make the process work and other election departments that are spending over $60 per registered voter. And you can imagine just the disparity in the quality that you might experience, if you have that difference in resources.”

Election officials are heading for the exits:   

“What that has looked like includes, in several states, we’ve seen data come out, the election officials are considering leaving their jobs. I think the state of Pennsylvania, something like a quarter of election directors or across counties plan to leave before 2024.”

About Tiana:

Tiana Epps-Johnson is Founder and Executive Director with the Center for Tech and Civic Life. She is leading a team that is doing groundbreaking work to make US elections more inclusive and secure. Prior to CTCL, she was the New Organizing Institute’s Election Administration Director from 2012 to 2015. She previously worked on the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

Tiana is a recipient of the 2020 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and was selected to join the inaugural cohorts of Obama Foundation Fellows (2018) and Harvard Ash Center Technology and Democracy Fellows (2015). Tiana earned a MSc in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University.