Where Does The Money Go? How Election Administrators Allocate their Budgets

Election administration in the United States is highly decentralized and funded primarily through local revenue, creating substantial variation in administrative resources across jurisdictions. This paper examines the relationship between county-level election funding and administrative capacity across North Carolina counties during federal elections from 2018 to 2024. I construct a novel dataset of county election budgets and connect this data to measures of administrative performance, including provisional ballot issuance, provisional ballot acceptance rates, and absentee ballot request processing times. I find that higher levels of election funding---particularly spending on salaries and benefits---are associated with greater administrative capacity. However, the positive relationship between funding and performance weakens in higher-poverty counties, suggesting that lower fiscal capacity constrains the effectiveness of election administration. In contrast, absentee ballot processing times appear primarily driven by demand rather than funding levels. These findings suggest that variation in local fiscal capacity contributes to uneven election administration and, in turn, unequal voter experiences across jurisdictions---even within the same state.