ABSTRACT

Election administration gets so few resources from American governments that we do not even know how much is spent. The sums are literally too trivial to merit national accounting. The smallest general expenditure category listed in the Census of Government for the Statistical Abstract of the United States is garbage disposal (solid waste management), on which the many units of government spend a total of about $14 billion. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has worked this year to figure out how much money is spent on running elections. Their best estimate, for operating expenditures just by counties, comes to a nationwide total of only about $1 billion. As we reflect that the general election of 2000 alone involved more than 100 million voters going to more than 190,000 polling places staffed by 1.4 million poll workers, we can hardly be surprised that there are problems. It is amazing, and a tribute to dedi-cated professional election administrators and many poll workers who practically volunteer their time, that the system works as well as it does.

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