How much did state and local governments spend responding to litigation and unrest tied to the 2020 election and its aftermath?
Executive summary
State and local governments do not appear to have a single, publicly compiled dollar figure for how much they spent responding to post‑2020 election litigation and the unrest that followed; available reporting documents the scale of litigation and higher election administration costs but stops short of aggregating remediation, litigation defense, security, and overtime expenses into one total [1] [2]. Public sources show dozens of suits and widespread additional spending pressures, which provide useful proxies but not a full ledger of state and local outlays [3] [4].
1. The scale of litigation: unprecedented in modern elections
The post‑2020 period saw an extraordinary volume of lawsuits — reporting counts range from roughly 62 suits focused on nine states up to 82 suits across 10 states and D.C. in the immediate post‑election window — a litigation footprint that by multiple accounts was “the most litigious in modern history” and created prolonged demands on state and local officials and courts [3] [1] [4].
2. What reporting documents: increased election administration spending, not a litigation tab
Research collated by election officials and legal observers documents marked increases in election spending for 2020 — surveys and analyses estimate nationwide election costs rose to between $3 billion and $6 billion for the 2020 cycle and many local offices reported spending 50 percent to 100 percent more than in a typical presidential election — but these figures describe running the election (staffing, PPE, mail‑ballot processing) rather than the downstream line items like legal defense, settlements, or security upgrades tied to litigation and unrest [2].
3. Where dollars can be found: piecemeal, state‑by‑state and agency reports
The concrete numbers that do exist come from fragmented, jurisdictional sources — court fee awards, local budget amendments for police overtime, or state attorney general budgets show some of the costs, but those are reported in scattered local documents rather than in centralized national accounting (reporting limitations: sources do not provide a compiled national total) [2]. Campaign Legal Center and other litigators catalog case outcomes and legal reasoning but do not estimate aggregate defense spending by governments [5].
4. Proxies and reasonable inferences — what can be estimated, cautiously
Because the litigation was both numerically large and often complex, reasonable inference suggests material legal costs: dozens of suits across many states required state attorneys general, county counsels, and local boards to engage outside counsel, respond to discovery, and appear in court repeatedly, while law enforcement and courts absorbed costs related to hearings and security; those activities would add millions in many states, but the sources provided do not quantify those sums into a single national figure [3] [4]. Analysts use proxies — increased election administration budgets and documented local overtime — to infer a multi‑million or multi‑hundred‑million aggregate, but that remains an estimate in the absence of systematic reporting [2].
5. Why no definitive national total exists in the reporting
There is no comprehensive federal requirement or mechanism that forces states and counties to tag and report every dollar spent specifically “responding to post‑2020 litigation and unrest,” and the academic and policy reporting surveyed documents litigation volume, legal outcomes, and election administration cost spikes rather than a unified fiscal accounting of defensive or security expenditures [1] [2]. Different actors — secretaries of state, county clerks, state AG offices, local police — log expenses in disparate places and under different budget lines, which produces the data fragmentation visible in the available sources [2].
6. The debate and divergent interpretations
Observers differ on the policy takeaway: some legal scholars emphasize that courts largely rejected the election challenges, framing the litigation as costly but legally unpersuasive [5] [4], while others argue that the strain on state and local systems — and the political pressure on officials — represented a non‑monetary damage that’s hard to quantify and should inform future preparedness spending [6] [7]. Both perspectives are visible in the reporting; neither supplies a consolidated dollar figure for total state and local spending on litigation response and unrest remediation [5] [6].
Conclusion
The public record assembled by election analysts, legal groups, and scholars describes the magnitude of post‑2020 litigation and confirms substantial increases in election‑related spending in 2020, but it does not add up to a single verified total for how much state and local governments collectively spent specifically responding to litigation and unrest; the sources reviewed document the problem’s scale and some proximate costs but stop short of an aggregate national dollar answer [1] [2] [5].