Congress funds election security like an afterthought — and 2026 is a midterm year

There is exactly one federal grant program built to pay for securing U.S. elections: the HAVA Election Security Grant, run by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.▸ It funds voting-system upgrades, cybersecurity audits, and poll worker training in all 50 states, DC, and five territories. It is also entirely optional from Congress's point of view — a line item that gets funded when someone remembers to ask, and skipped when they don't. Nine election cycles after the grant restarted in 2018, that pattern has produced 2026: a midterm year funded at roughly a tenth of the program's peak.

HAVA Election Security money is not an annual appropriation like defense or highways — it is a discretionary line that Congress has included in some consolidated appropriations acts and left out of others.▸ The record since the grant restarted after the 2016 election interference concerns:

Congress appropriated $380 million in FY2018 and $425 million in FY2020 — the two big post-2016, post-2020 pushes to harden voting systems against interference.▸ Then it funded nothing at all in FY2019 and FY2021, per the Congressional Research Service's tracking of these appropriations. Since then the line has only shrunk: $75 million in FY2022 and FY2023, $55 million in FY2024, a low of $15 million in FY2025, and $45 million for FY2026 — the year of the midterms. Measured against the FY2020 peak, that is an 89% cut, arriving in the same year state and local election offices are supposed to be running the machinery that decides control of Congress.

The grant doesn't fund poll workers' pay, but it funds the systems and training around them — and the workforce it's meant to support hasn't shrunk to match the money.▸ More than 770,000 people served as poll workers in the 2024 general election, per the EAC's own Election Administration and Voting Survey. Recruiting them has actually gotten modestly easier — 47.9% of jurisdictions called it difficult in 2024, down from 54.1% in the 2022 midterms:

But recruitment ease and institutional support are not the same thing.▸ In the Brennan Center's 2026 survey of 834 local election officials — fielded January 27 to February 26, 2026 — 75% said their state or local government had not provided additional resources to make up for federal cuts to election security services, and satisfaction with federal support fell from 53% in 2024 to 45% in 2026. Fifty-two percent of officials are worried about their colleagues' safety. The people showing up to run the 2026 midterms are, by their own account, doing it with less backup than the last cycle — not because the workload changed, but because the federal grant meant to cover the gap between "election" and "secure election" keeps arriving smaller, or not at all.

Figures cover the HAVA Election Security Grant specifically, not total federal election spending (which also includes CARES Act and other one-time appropriations in some years); FY2026 dollar figures reflect the enacted consolidated appropriations act as reported by the EAC.