WASHINGTON — The federal government has sought to bolster election security for years through a popular grant program, but the wildly fluctuating funding levels have made it difficult for state officials to plan their budgets and their projects.
Rising misinformation and disinformation about elections, often fueled by conspiracy theories, as well as threats against election workers, make the grants especially important, according to elections officials.
But U.S. House Republicans are seeking to eliminate funding for election security grants — known as Help America Vote Act, or HAVA grants — in this year’s appropriations process, a move they unsuccessfully attempted last year as well.
“We continue to unnecessarily risk the very integrity of our elections and American democracy,” Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop said Thursday during committee debate on the funding bill.
Bishop, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he was “concerned about the outdated and the insecure voting systems around the country that pose a very, very serious threat to our national security and to our democratic system.”
“It is irresponsible to ignore the wake-up call,” Bishop added. “Our nation’s election systems are currently and constantly under attack by foreign actors that are threatening our democratic values.”
The bill was approved by the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee with no money in it for the grants.
Gideon Cohn-Postar, legislative director at Issue One & Issue One Action, said during an interview with States Newsroom that while the grants have traditionally been bipartisan, several factors have affected backing for the program in recent years.
“It remains something that many Republicans in both the House and the Senate support,” Cohn-Postar said. “But it’s also been caught up, I think, in some of the false information about elections that began to spread in 2020.”
Former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Issue One writes on its website that the organization strives to “unite Republicans, Democrats, and independents in the movement to fix our broken political system and build an inclusive democracy that works for everyone.”
Grant funding decreases
Congress approved $55 million in election security grants during the last appropriations process, which wrapped up this spring. That action came after the Republican-controlled House, which proposed zero dollars, conferenced with the Democratic-controlled Senate, which had proposed $75 million in funding.
That final funding level was a decrease from the $75 million that Congress approved in both fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022.
Congress didn’t approve any election grant funding in the annual appropriations bill during fiscal year 2021. However, that followed lawmakers’ allocation of $425 million in the prior year’s bill as well as an additional $400 million in one of the COVID-19 emergency spending bills.
