Originally published in Vox on April 17, 2022.
———-

Alicia Cruz was homeless before she and her four daughters moved into a newly vacant apartment in Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, about three years ago. As she stood in the kitchen and watched dirty water clog up the sink, the landlord promised he’d have it fixed before they moved in.

But it was just the beginning. The ceiling of her apartment was cracked; the heating was inadequate, so she and her daughters are usually freezing; due to water damage, they regularly deal with roaches. She’s tried to leave but couldn’t find suitable alternatives she could afford.

“If I knew then what I know now, I probably would have ran out the door and stayed homeless a little longer,” Cruz testified to Pennsylvania state lawmakers in December, later adding: “To this day, the landlord won’t fix this place, but he wants to collect my rent money. It’s just really sad.”

The nation’s affordable housing crisis has gotten some semblance of attention — with journalists writing stories on the rising cost of rent, the scarce supply of new housing, the looming threat of eviction — but one aspect of the crisis has gone consistently overlooked. On top of the severe housing shortage that currently exists, nearly 6 million homes nationwide have moderate to serious home health hazards. They require repairs that, if left ignored, will make them uninhabitable, and eventually they’ll disappear from the market altogether.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition, a research and advocacy group, estimates a shortage of 7 million affordable housing units for low-income renters, but those figures don’t account for all the existing affordable units that stand at risk of demolition.

Issues like lead paint, leaky roofs, and knob-and-tube wiring don’t just leave tenants and homeowners in substandard, unsafe housing. They also leave families — mostly poor families — shut out from energy efficiency programs the federal government already funds to upgrade homes. Due to inflexible program restrictions, homes with outstanding repairs aren’t eligible for existing weatherization subsidies, despite those families arguably needing them the most. Addressing this problem could help solve both the affordable housing and the climate crisis at once.

Low-income households in particular have a lot to gain from the federal Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), which provides funds to repair or replace heating and cooling systems, treat windows, or make any of the other upgrades that can not only reduce home energy use but also substantially reduce utility bills. But as it stands now, it’s people living in homes with no mold, asbestos, or structural issues who can access those WAP funds. Low-income homeowners and renters must first find the resources to fix their units, with some repairs running as high as $50,000.

The sheer number of homes barred from weatherization due to outstanding health and safety issues is immense. In Connecticut, for example, between 2017 and 2019, nearly 25 percent of income-eligible homes were barred from weatherization upgrades. Steve Luxton, who heads a nonprofit focused on helping Philadelphians weatherize their homes, told me 55 to 65 percent of those in his city who apply for WAP assistance are denied because of structural issues. And nationally, according to a recently published E4TheFuture analysis, 10 to 30 percent of income-eligible clients are deferred from weatherization upgrades each year for health and safety problems, with those deferrals on the rise.

Not being able to weatherize homes doesn’t just present cost burdens for low-income households, it also has a direct impact on the climate crisis. The energy required to cool, heat, and provide electricity to residential buildings accounts for 20 percent of annual energy use in the US, with older homes emitting more carbon.

Included in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill Congress passed in November was a $3.5 billion investment in the federal weatherization program, with the stated goal to increase energy efficiency, increase health and safety, and reduce annual energy costs for low-income households. A 2015 Department of Energy evaluation of WAP found the energy efficiency upgrades it subsidized led to households saving an average of $283 per year on their bills.

The Biden administration estimates the new infusion of funds from the infrastructure bill will allow the government to help 450,000 households weatherize over a decade. But low-income homeowners and tenants will remain shut out from the new money if they aren’t able to make the repairs they need.

“There will always be a tension, saying, ‘Okay, should I spend a thousand dollars to fix that roof when I could weatherize someone else’s house now?” said Charlie Harak, senior attorney for energy and utilities issues at the National Consumer Law Center. “But I’d go so far as to say that often the houses most in need of weatherization get walked away from.”

It’s certainly not easy to come up with money for those repairs. If you’re a low-income homeowner, you would likely struggle to get an affordable home improvement loan from a bank. You may have less than optimal credit, and depending on where your house is located, the house itself may have low equity. If you’re a renter, your landlord probably feels little pressure to make your unit energy efficient, given that it’s tenants, not the property owners, who typically shoulder the electricity and gas bills.

According to US census data, low-income households spent an average of 8.1 percent of their income on energy costs, compared to 2.3 percent for wealthier households. It’s not uncommon for poor families to pull back on other expenses, like medicine, groceries, or child care to cover their energy bills.

Jeff Genzer, who has served as counsel for the National Association of State Energy Officials since 1986, told me the intersection of housing and energy issues is one of the most difficult problems he’s worked on in his career. Steve Cowell, executive director of E4TheFuture and a longtime energy efficiency advocate, said the problem originates from treating health and safety issues as a footnote.

“The whole energy efficiency world that developed over the last 30 years was focused on pieces of the puzzle, and primarily the costs and benefits of energy on an economic dollar basis,” he said. “The health, safety, and conditions of a home has just been seen in the background, a side deal.”

Experts like Cowell have been trying to urge attention on the so-called “non-energy impacts” of weatherization, such as reduced asthma, reduced missed days of work, and fewer home fires. One evaluation published in 2016 assessed that each weatherized Massachusetts housing unit yielded an estimated $1,381 in combined savings to the individual household and society, with some of those savings coming from literally preventing deaths.

The climate crisis has made this harder to ignore

When the energy efficiency movement got its start in the 1970s following the oil crisis, talk of reducing carbon emissions was simply not a salient consideration for policymakers and practitioners, and wouldn’t become one for years.

But as the stakes of the climate crisis have grown clearer, the last 10 years have marked a sea change for the energy efficiency movement. While in prior decades policymakers could ignore home upgrades when they deemed weatherization not “cost-effective,” today they have to wrestle with the fact that the low-income renters living in subsidized apartments are using even more energy than other households, typically because their units are older and built with less efficient tech.

One study published in 2019 by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that making energy upgrades — including to residential buildings — could cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050. Upgrades to homes and buildings could save 30 percent on average for most buildings, ACEEE wrote, while installing sensors, automated controls, and other smart software could reduce energy use by another 15 percent.

The carbon emissions produced by old, decrepit housing are not the only environmental threat. A warming planet also threatens to put more homes into disrepair or wipe them out from the existing housing stock altogether, exacerbating our housing shortage. For example, if a fire or natural disaster doesn’t completely destroy a unit, the owner has to decide whether to then repair or demolish it. Affordable rental units are more likely to be demolished than rebuilt, given the tight profit margins they operate on.

Upgrading home energy systems won’t make those homes more capable of withstanding the effects of climate change. As Carlos Martín, the director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me, energy efficiency upgrades are climate mitigation steps; they would help reduce future emissions to make the crisis less severe. But addressing home repairs, like fixing broken roofs, floors, and windows — those investments would strengthen existing housing stock to better withstand more frequent storms, flooding, and heat.

The growing affordable housing crisis has brought increased pressure to this situation. Depreciation is one of the top three threats to preserving existing affordable housing. It’s a hard issue to mobilize around though, because, like global warming, it’s a crisis we’re hurtling toward but haven’t yet reached. Weatherizing affordable homes could help avoid that fate; lowering maintenance costs can improve a property’s cash flow, which can then be used to reinvest in other capital needs.

More than a quarter of American households in 2020 reported difficulty paying their energy bills. Harak, from the National Consumer Law Center, noted that failure to pay utility bills is considered a breach of the lease in most subsidized housing, leaving the renter highly vulnerable to eviction.

“It’s a significant issue from an aspect of equity,” said Andrew Aurand, vice president for research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “If these people are priced out, where would they actually go?”

A first-of-its-kind legislative fix

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are exploring a legislative solution to this problem, through a first-of-its-kind bill in the nation. Introduced in March by Democratic state Sen. Nikil Saval, the Whole-Home Repairs Act would provide eligible residents with grants up to $50,000 to make needed home repairs, and small landlords could apply for the same amount in forgivable loans. The bill would also aim to ramp up investments in workforce development, to address the growing shortage of qualified workers able to address the repairs.

By finally fixing up the homes, tenants like Alicia Cruz would not only be able to live in safer and healthier environments, they’d also be finally positioned to access weatherization dollars. More than 280,000 occupied homes across Pennsylvania are estimated to have moderate to severe physical issues, ranging from exposed wiring to failed plumbing and leaky windows. Environmental justice activists note that making the housing repairs would also help those being targeted with offers by property developers, and help more seniors age in their own homes, a strong preference for many elderly families who live on fixed incomes.

Genzer, of the National Association of State Energy Officials, told me he thinks Saval’s proposal is an “excellent bill” but that the $50,000 price tag for repairs “tells you a lot” about how difficult this problem can be politically.

Still, it’s not a long shot. Though Saval is a left-wing Philly Democrat, his bill has captured support from some heavyweight Republican legislators in Harrisburg, including Republican Sen. Pat Browne, chair of the state appropriations committee. Another is Sen. Dave Argall, chair of the state government committee, who has worked on blight issues for more than a decade.

“I represent a lot of struggling old mining communities where most of the coal mining stopped in the 1940s and 1950s,” Argall told me. “What I liked about Sen. Saval’s bill is if we help fix up the housing before they completely go to rot, that’s better for the people living in the homes, better for the next-door neighbor, and better for the taxpayer if they don’t have to fund millions and millions in demolition costs.”

Argall said he thinks the bill has “a very good chance” of passage in this year’s budget cycle, though the precise dollar amount is still being negotiated. Saval is pointing to the state’s $6 billion budget surplus and unspent Covid-19 relief dollars as strong sources to seed the new program.

Saval campaigned on affordable housing issues, but his office said data released last spring by the progressive polling firm Data for Progress was particularly instrumental in shaping some of their thinking around the politics. A survey of likely voters across Pennsylvania found 87 percent of respondents supported weatherizing homes to make them more energy efficient, including 83 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of independents.

While the home repairs bill would not itself go toward making energy efficiency upgrades, it would position more homes to be able to access the WAP funds. “We’re trying to make that federal money work more effectively,” Saval told me.

On the federal level, the Department of Energy has been slow to take this problem seriously, though advocates say conversations are starting to happen. The pandemic also elevated the conversation around staying home, indoor air quality, and respiratory illness.

“There’s some new efforts to think through this,” said Cowell, of E4TheFuture. “But they still struggle to decide if weatherization should go beyond just the straight economic savings.” The federal agency still doesn’t require states to report the number of homes deferred from the weatherization program for repairs, and not all states track those “weatherization walkaways” consistently.

Some states can dedicate a portion of their Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funds for weatherization, a pot of money that tends to have a bit more flexibility than WAP funds in how it can be spent. Still, spending patterns for LIHEAP vary dramatically across states, and most of the money still goes for its primary purpose — helping poor families defray the cost of their energy bills. In 2015, less than 10 percent of total federal LIHEAP funds were used on weatherization.

In Congress, weatherization has bipartisan support, but there’s been less momentum to address the home repair issues that prevent energy upgrades. Still, Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans, who represents Pennsylvania’s Third Congressional District, including parts of Philadelphia, told me he thinks Saval’s Whole-Home Repairs Act could become a national model. After all, Pennsylvania is showing how blight issues can bring collaboration across the aisle. And a Data for Progress poll from January found investing in energy efficiency for buildings to be one of the most popular climate policies nationally, especially given high energy prices.

“I think this program has great potential — it can be a vital part of the federal, state, and local investment that we need,” Evans said. “I’ve supported and voted for increased federal investments in affordable housing, and this would fit well with that.”

Originally published in The Intercept on April 1, 2022.
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THROUGHOUT 2020, as then-President Donald Trump issued baseless claims of voter fraud, local election officials called on the federal government to spend more to ensure a secure election season. Turnout was expected to break records; the pandemic had upended voting plans and safety protocols; and cybersecurity threats mounted. Leaders were acutely aware of the vulnerabilities in their aging election technology: Thousands of counties, for example, still ran their voting machines on Windows 7, an operating system so old it no longer receives routine security updates.

Congress did authorize $400 million to run elections in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, with funds permitted for expenses like buying personal protective equipment and hiring temporary staff to process the increase in absentee ballots. But those funds ran out quickly amid the costly primaries. Election officials, national security experts, and business leaders nationwide sent Congress letters throughout the spring and summer stressing why that figure could only represent a down payment ahead of the November election. A study of swing states conducted by the right-leaning Washington, D.C. think tank R Street Institute found that the election support afforded by the CARES Act provided just a small fraction — 10 to 18 percent — of what was needed.

But Congress didn’t budge. And so in an unprecedented move, private philanthropy stepped forward to plug the holes. A Chicago-based nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life administered nearly $350 million in philanthropic grants during the 2020 cycle, reaching almost 2,500 counties across 49 states. A majority of that funding was donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and every eligible election department that applied for funding was approved, according to the group. “Despite election officials basically begging our federal government for assistance, that money never came through,” Liz Howard, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, said weeks after the election. “Congress really failed our election officials.”

Fortunately for democracy, soon after Democrats took control of Congress and the White House, the party was laying plans to provide robust funding for election infrastructure.

But now, more than a year later, the politics that surround election funding have changed dramatically, though the need for modernizing and securing election systems has not. Conservatives, angry and suspicious that Facebook and Silicon Valley tilted the scales to help Democrats, have moved to ban future philanthropic donations for elections. In Wisconsin, a special counsel appointed by Republicans released an interim report accusing Zuckerberg of breaking bribery laws with the grants. More than a dozen Republican-controlled states, including Georgia, Florida and Arizona, have passed new restrictions on private donations to election offices since November 2020, and more states are currently drafting similar legislation. Absent new sources of government funding, these bans could yield cuts to election locations and election workers in the midterms.

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In its recently passed $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, Congress included just $75 million for election security. That’s a fraction of what lawmakers authorized in 2020 and an amount experts say is nowhere near sufficient to address the needs ahead of the next election.

At the center of this failure is the Brennan Center, an influential liberal think tank and advocacy organization. Based in New York City, the Brennan Center rarely gets public scrutiny, but it plays an outsize role in the strategic direction of the movement pushing for voting rights and election reform. That flows partly from its massive war chest, which has skyrocketed over the last decade: Between 2010 and 2020, its net earnings grew from $196,000 to $58 million. Its assets jumped from $8 million to $90 million.

That financial firepower, coupled with the credibility in Washington that it has built over the years, gives the Brennan Center effective veto power over the voting rights advocacy coalition it leads. In Congress, revisions to election and voting laws are often met with the question, “What does the Brennan Center think?”

THE LEGISLATIVE DANCE has always involved inside players and outside pressure, but two interlocking trends have significantly walled off outsider influence and consolidated insider power. Partisan polarization means that there are few rogue bipartisan gangs to be pulled together, and the consolidation of power by congressional leaders has muted the influence of rank-and-file members and even committee chairs. K Street has rushed to fill that void — but so too have a select handful of major nonprofits, whose deliberations and strategic decisions have taken on exponential importance.

This made the Brennan Center’s decision to pull back on the effort to fund elections all the more consequential. Its political attention and lobbying shifted to passing the Free­dom to Vote Act, the Democrats’ comprehensive voting rights bill that would, among other things, expand voter registration, ban partisan gerrymandering, weaken state-level voter ID requirements, and restore preclearance, a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Brennan Center played a key role in crafting the omnibus legislation, including its earlier iterations like the “For the People Act.”

In a letter sent to congressional leadership in late July, a coalition of 19 national advocacy groups, including the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Mi Familia Vota, urged Congress to allocate $20 billion for election infrastructure, citing the hundreds of local election officials, mayors, and secretaries of state who had begged for that amount earlier in the month. “As the individuals and leaders closest to the administration of fair and secure elections, they have collectively called for federal support in meeting the immense needs they face,” the national groups wrote. “We write to add our voices to that important ask.”

The Brennan Center declined to sign.

“It was one of the most jaw-dropping moments of my professional life,” said one election reform lobbyist whose organization signed the letter and who requested anonymity to describe the coalition’s private discussions.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said his organization “felt that the dollar amount that the letter was asking for did not make sense based on our expertise and research and policy analysis … that it was too much,” though he could not say what a better figure would be. “My colleagues on this who are aligned certainly thought it was too much, and we thought the dollar amount was too high to be asking for at that time,” he added.

The timing of the ask also didn’t strike them as appropriate, Waldman said. “It was in the heat of the fight for the [For the People] Act, which we regard as the most important voting rights legislation in half a century. … I thought that [the request] was a distraction and a detour from the very hard fight needed to pass voting rights legislation.”

His comments about the size of the request for election funding reflected a departure from the Brennan Center’s previous public statements, a fact noticed by both this reporter and the organization’s press shop. The following day, a Brennan Center spokesperson, Alexandra Ringe, who had been listening in on our interview, called to ask if I would consider taking Waldman’s statements about the size of the election funding request off the record, saying they would not go over well with their coalition partners. I declined.

In a subsequent email, Ringe wrote that Waldman had “misremembered the decision-making related to the sign-on letter” and that fear of distracting from the Freedom to Vote Act was the sole factor in the Brennan Center’s decision not to sign. Waldman himself followed up to say that he had misspoken in our previous conversation, reiterating that the organization chose not to sign the letter “because of our concerns … that it would distract from the final push for voting rights legislation.”

BECAUSE OF THE wildly varying ways that counties tabulate their costs, the precise amount of funding election officials need is not clear. “What we do know from three years of surveys of local elections officials nationwide is that consistent and reliable funding is the most commonly mentioned issue,” Paul Gronke, the founder of the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College, told me. “We all recognize that what we are currently spending is far too low and funding is too irregular. … But hard numbers are difficult to obtain because of the diverse ways that budgets are managed.”

The last major federal investment in election funding was the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.5 billion for state upgrades. But it took years for that funding to get appropriated, and the costs and threats to elections have only gone up since then. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study recently estimated that the “current level of spending puts elections at near the bottom of spending for public services, ranking approximately the same levels as spending by local governments to maintain parking facilities.”

Advocates for more funding say that reliable appropriations can go toward things like bolstering election audit systems, patching cybersecurity vulnerabilities, upgrading voter registration databases, and investing in equipment like ballot sorters and envelope stuffers. The advent of election official retirements expected before the 2024 cycle is adding even more pressure, as hiring and training new staff will get more expensive.

The Election Infrastructure Initiative, a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, puts the tab to fully modernize U.S. elections at $53 billion over the next 10 years. The initiative has called on Congress to allocate less than half of that, $20 billion. That ask has been endorsed in letters by secretaries of state, mayors, and election administrators. In a February poll by Data for Progress, nearly three-quarters of respondents supported congressional spending to upgrade state and local voting equipment and security systems.

Many local election leaders have struggled to understand why the Brennan Center — a group with the ear of influential Democrats in Congress — dropped prioritization of election funding over the last year, particularly after helping elevate their concerns during the pandemic. Moreover, while the Freedom to Vote Act would push many election reforms that are needed and overdue, those changes would not come cheap. Advocates worried that chaos could come from a slew of new unfunded mandates.

Jessica Huseman, one of the country’s leading voting rights journalists, detailed many of these concerns publicly last spring in a Daily Beast op-ed. The For the People Act “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows,” Huseman wrote, noting that it was packed with deadlines and obligations that would be impossible for election officials to meet. “The sections of the bill related to voting systems … show remarkably little understanding of the problems the authors apply alarmingly prescriptive solutions to.”

The Brennan Center quickly issued a defense of the bill it had helped draft, publishing a response to Huseman’s piece on its website. The center defended the amount authorized in funding for upgrades and maintenance. But “there have been millions in authorized funding that has never been appropriated,” Huseman, who currently serves as editorial director of Votebeat, told me. “Looking specifically to voting, the funding promised in the Help America Vote Act took 15 years to actually become appropriated, even though the states were on the hook for the requirements long before this. This is the origin of the anxiety for state election administrators, and I think it’s a well-founded concern.”

“Brennan Center gets way over their skis on election policy,” said one national election reformer who has partnered with the organization on research and requested anonymity because their organization shares some of the same funders as the Brennan Center. “They’ve been great [at] fleshing out the more liberal position on voting rights, but when it comes to election administration … they are not that connected to the election officials community … and they haven’t really wrestled with the implications of what they advocate for.”

“The charitable answer is they didn’t want to have a fight about money until after the bill had passed, but you can easily pass the bill and not win the money,” said the election lobbyist, who was shocked that the center didn’t join the July letter. “There’s a few folks who work there like Larry Norden [the senior director of Brennan’s Elections and Government Program] who have done good work on these issues, but they couldn’t get it through to their higher-ups.”

FOR THOSE HOPING that 2021 would yield new federal commitments for election funding, things took a turn for the worse late last summer.

Throughout July, as Senate Democrats prepared their $3.5 trillion social spending request, lawmakers assured state and local election officials that their proposal would include billions for election funding. A Politico story published just four days before the package was unveiled confirmed that lawmakers were eyeing as much as $15 to $20 billion for that purpose and felt confident that they could deliver, even as their voting rights bill remained stalled.

But at the eleventh hour the funding was pulled, at the urging of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had “abruptly” changed her mind, as Huseman reported in a detailed ticktock of the negotiations. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., the author of the For the People Act, had convinced Pelosi that authorizing election funding would reduce their leverage to pass his bill, the same argument the Brennan Center used to justify not signing the coalition letter.

Leading negotiations in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was angry. She felt blindsided by Pelosi’s move, per Huseman’s sources, even as spokespersons for both House leaders defended the last-minute cuts. The spokespersons told Huseman that election funding would require more “safeguards” to ensure it couldn’t be used for voter suppression, but top federal elections experts say there is no history of misspending those funds. “After all,” Huseman wrote, “it costs far less money to close polling locations and remove drop boxes, and state legislatures across the country have been doing this without any additional spending since the 2020 election.” (Klobuchar, Pelosi, and Sarbanes did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment for this story.)

“All of the money that’s been released has been for specific purposes,” Kathleen Hale, a political scientist who directs the Election Administration Initiative at Auburn University, told The Intercept. “It’s all been audited; I’ve been doing this for the last 15 years, and there’s absolutely nothing going on like that.”

While it was becoming too late in the negotiations process to pivot to funding elections in the infrastructure deal, the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act was looking increasingly doomed in the Senate. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., made it clear that she was not willing to gut the filibuster — a legislative move that would have been required to ensure the bill’s passage. A Punchbowl News survey of senior congressional staffers found that even among Democratic staff, just 12 percent thought the bill had a shot.

Some leaders urged Congress to push forward with a narrower bill, abandoning demands like public financing of elections, to which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ala., had expressed strong opposition. Others within the voting rights coalition faced immense pressure to stay quiet when they raised concerns about technical language in the statute, saying the Brennan Center in particular warned that even private deliberations could derail passage of the bill itself.

Noticing the deadlock on Capitol Hill, some groups began to discuss alternatives. In January, for example, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a report in collaboration with the centrist and right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, Issue One, R Street Institute, and Unite America.

Their proposals recommend federal funding to states that meet a series of minimum voting standards but eschew federal mandates, in the hopes of garnering GOP support. The coalition urged steady, annual funding for elections but left the door open on exactly how to determine the formula.

Others had been pushing a narrower bill since last spring. In March 2021, professor of law and political science Rick Hasen published an op-ed in the Washington Post urging for legislation to protect voting rights directly and abandonment of the “wish list of progressive proposals” that stood little shot of survival in the Senate. “At the moment, it seems more likely that nothing will become law before the 2022 elections than that H.R. 1 will,” Hasen wrote, referencing the For the People Act. Edward Foley, the director of the Election Law program at the Ohio State University, wrote another Post op-ed two weeks later, arguing that the “priority should be ensuring passage of what’s absolutely essential for securing federal elections that enable voters to choose the officeholders who get to exercise power.”

And still others noted that the For the People Act would do little to actually stop the most immediate threat to elections that arose from the 2020 cycle: subversion. The New York Times editorial board made this point in June, writing that “Democrats in Congress have crafted an election bill, H.R. 1, that is poorly matched to the moment.” The For the People Act, the Times board said, ”attempts to accomplish more than is currently feasible, while failing to address some of the clearest threats to democracy, especially the prospect that state officials will seek to overturn the will of voters.”

The Brennan Center rebuffed criticisms that the For the People Act was too big. The scope of the legislation, Waldman stressed, was what gave it its power. “It enabled a movement to form of diversity and breadth that we have not seen on this issue in my 40 years working on democracy issues,” he told me. “This was the most important civil rights legislation in half a century … [and it] doesn’t always succeed on the first try.”

Narrower bills have narrower constituencies of support, Waldman wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last spring. He dismissed both Hasen and Foley as “some pundits” and said that keeping the legislation his organization helped craft together was the best way to ensure its chances of becoming law. While Waldman noted proudly that the bill claimed support of “civil rights groups, good government groups, labor unions, many election officials, and others,” it was not clear who among those left-leaning constituencies he thought might disclaim backing if Congress had decided to pare it down.

But the Brennan Center’s stance on the savviness of avoiding compromise and standing in coalition with partners stood in tension with its reticence to make big funding asks, including for election security. The Brennan Center discouraged Congress from whittling down the voting rights legislation, even as experts warned of unfunded mandates that could create new security and logistical threats for election workers.

ADVOCATES FOR NEW infusions of election funding have turned their sights to the White House, in the hopes that President Joe Biden can pressure Congress to act quickly before the midterms.

In mid-December, a coalition of 14 secretaries of state — including from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Arizona — sent a letter to Biden requesting that he include $5 billion for election infrastructure in his fiscal year 2023 budget, as part of a commitment of $20 billion over 10 years. (Last year Biden did not include funding for elections in his administration’s budget.)

In February, members of Congress joined in. Democratic Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia, Colin Allred of Texas, and Tom O’Halleran of Arizona led 43 of their colleagues in a letter to Biden requesting that he include $5 billion in his next budget. Thirty-three Democratic senators, led by Klobuchar and Richard Durbin of Illinois, followed suit two weeks later. Advocates also pressed Biden to mention election funding in his State of the Union address, to no avail.

Advocates were heard, sort of. On Monday, Biden released his 2023 budget and called for $10 billion over the next decade for election infrastructure upgrades — half of what activists requested. While hailed as a positive step, it offers no guarantees: Congress often ignores presidential budget asks.

Meanwhile, as the voting rights package remains in limbo, the new year has brought momentum to the issue of addressing election subversion, or the threat that the true winner of an election will not be declared the winner. While many defenses against election subversion happen at the state and local level, from a federal standpoint lawmakers could make tweaks to an 1887 statute known as the Electoral Count Act, which governs the end stages of a presidential election. At present, the Electoral Count Act could allow Congress to object to counting votes from a state, and it is also vague on the responsibilities of a vice president in counting electoral votes. McConnell has suggested that he’s open to tweaking the law, and a bipartisan group of senators have been meeting to discuss a path forward.

Election funding and election subversion are not unrelated issues. While immediate fears about subversion have been tied to rogue election clerks and state legislators, poorly funding elections heightens risk too. “Inadequately funded elections can lead to foreign or domestic actors tampering with our voting technology, voter registration databases, or machines that count ballots,” said Hasen. “And when funding is inadequate it creates opportunities for mistakes to happen and creates opportunities for people to try to manipulate things without oversight.”

The Brennan Center, for its part, hasn’t abandoned the election funding issue. In January, Gowri Ramachandran, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, testified before the House subcommittee on cybersecurity about election risks and suggested that Congress could also provide support for the physical safety and security of elections personnel and elections offices, though she did not suggest a specific figure. Earlier this month, the Brennan Center published a resource estimating the cost of preventing insider election threats over the next five years to be about $316 million.

But the clock is ticking for more serious investments. Following the recent passage of the House budget on March 9, the Election Infrastructure Initiative issued a critical statement, blasting it for insufficiently funding physical and cybersecurity measures for local election departments. The $75 million that lawmakers approved was also far less than the $500 million the House included in its original spending proposal. The Brennan Center did not issue a statement on Congress’s allocation for election funding, though individual leaders, including Norden and Derek Tisler, an attorney for Brennan’s Democracy Program, criticized the $75 million amount as too small.

Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center, maintains that the organization took the right approach last year and will look for “every opportunity” it can this year to pass strong voter protections, “with eyes wide open about the challenges.”

“There’s this ‘Big Lie’ movement out there trying to undermine American democracy that is scary and alarming, but I think there is a democracy movement that has been formed in response … that is vibrant and diverse and angry,” Waldman added. “This movement is not done and this issue is not done. We push forward.”