New federal grants aimed to support elections. Many voting officials didn't see a dime

Elections in the United States are chronically underfunded.

It's one of the few things voting officials across the political spectrum agree on.

In Kentucky, for instance, Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams said before he came into office in 2020, the state had not adjusted how much it gave to counties to support elections since the 1980s.

"We had election equipment that was nearing decertification," Adams said. "We weren't able to do the most basic things, like recounts."

Estimates on exactly how much the country spends on democracy every year vary, but one recent report from MIT and the American Enterprise Institute found that local governments spend roughly the same amount to support voting as they do to maintain their parking facilities.

So when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced last year that it would require a portion of a multibillion-dollar grant program to go toward election security, much of the voting community celebrated — even if it was just a sliver of the money many experts say is ultimately needed.

"This new funding has the potential to provide meaningful support to our guardians of democracy," elections experts Larry Norden and Derek Tisler of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time. "It is also a meaningful statement from the federal government that it understands threats of physical violence against those who run our elections are a threat to our democracy itself."

But NPR has learned that in many cases, the grant allocations did not go as planned.

Multiple election officials and experts told NPR that at least some portion of the money either did not actually go to reinforcing the country's voting infrastructure, or was spent in a haphazard manner with little thought