Running U.S. Elections Costs $4–6 Billion a Year. Most of the People Doing It Are Retirees.

No federal agency runs a U.S. election.▸ Roughly 8,000 counties, cities, and townships do, each paying its own bills and hiring its own temporary workforce twice a year. That arrangement is easy to overlook when the system is working and hard to ignore when it isn't — and 2026, a midterm year, is a good moment to look at both sides of it: what the machine costs, and who is actually standing behind the check-in table.

Nobody keeps a single national ledger for election spending — there is no federal line item to read, because there is no federal election budget.▸ Charles Stewart III's 2022 analysis for MIT's Election Data + Science Lab pulled together every credible estimate of the last two decades — local government spending reports, state clerk associations, a nationwide survey of election officials — and found they converge: running U.S. elections costs $4 billion to $6 billion in a "normal" year, rising toward $10 billion in a pandemic year like 2020. A separate decade-long projection by the Election Infrastructure Initiative, cited in the same report, lands on $53.3 billion over ten years — $5.3 billion a year, in the same range.

The spike in 2020 is real and mostly a pandemic story — mailing ballots to every voter, buying protective equipment, renting larger polling sites for distancing.▸ But the baseline matters more: even in an ordinary midterm, the country spends billions of dollars a year on a function almost nobody funds centrally. Washington's only sustained contribution has been one-time. Under the Help America Vote Act, Congress has appropriated almost $3 billion total over the past 20 years — not per year — mostly to replace voting equipment after 2000, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission itself says plainly that "the federal government does not provide ongoing funding for election administration." A handful of states patch the gap on their own terms: Kentucky reimburses counties for personnel costs up to 50 cents per registered voter per year; Tennessee sends counties a flat $18,000 a year toward one administrator's salary. Nothing in that patchwork adds up to a guaranteed budget, in a presidential year or a midterm.

Money buys equipment and rents buildings.▸ It doesn't check in a voter, hand over a ballot, or run a scanner at 8 p.m. when the polls close — that work is done by temporary poll workers, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey counted more than 770,000 of them nationwide for the 2024 general election, only 15.5% of whom had never done the job before.

The EAC's own report calls out the trend by name: the age distribution of poll workers was "notably younger" in the pandemic-era 2020 election, then skewed older in 2022 and skewed older again in 2024, when a majority — 59% combining the 61–70 and 71-or-older brackets — were 61 or older. Barely one in eight was under 40.

There is a genuine complication in that story, and it's worth stating plainly: the EAC also found that recruiting poll workers has gotten easier, not harder, for three straight election cycles.▸ More than half of jurisdictions called recruitment difficult in 2020 and 2022; in 2024, for the first time in that stretch, it was under half. Jurisdictions are filling the roster. They're filling it with an older bench.

Spending figures are national extrapolations from state-level and survey data, not a single audited total — no such total exists. Poll-worker age data reflects the 61.9% of jurisdictions that reported an age breakdown to the 2024 EAVS; casewise deletion means national shares don't sum to exactly 100%.