D.C.’s top elections officials complained yesterday that they’re being shortchanged on funding for the April 23 special election, leaving them with little option but to cut corners.

Clifford Tatum, the director of the D.C. Board of Elections, told Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5) that while he had requested $1,046,800, he had only been given $832,788 to run the election, which will include an At-Large D.C. Council seat and the budget autonomy charter amendment referendum. While cuts were being made to bring costs down, Tatum said that he would not be able to run the election without an additional disbursement of funds.

This isn’t the first time that the elections board has complained about funding. For the April 2011 At-Large special election, the board was given $79,000 less than it requested, while for the primary a year later it only got the full amount it had asked for after city officials provided it with supplemental funding.

Elections board chairwoman Deborah Nichols said that with the back-to-back years of budget surpluses, the city should be more adequately funding local elections. “This is nickel-and-diming the electorate,” she said, arguing that without the proper amount of money D.C. voters would continue to see some of the problems that have dogged balloting in recent years. (In 2008 D.C. was second only to Mississippi in managing the worst elections in the country, while last year voters in D.C. waited longer than everyone except Florida to cast their ballot.)

Some election watchers, though, say that money alone won’t fix the city’s management of elections. And yesterday Tatum addressed a recent complaint that the city wasn’t adequately updating its voter rolls with change-of-address forms, saying that it would conduct its biennial canvas of the electorate in May. Still, he said that a legislative fix would be needed to allow the board more flexibility in how often it can check and update its database. Due to three straight years of special elections, he noted, the board has been hard-pressed to conduct the canvas.

As for the April 23 special election, Tatum predicted that between 14 and 15 percent of the city’s voters would cast ballots; in 2011, 10 percent did. He also said that this would be the first time ever that all precincts would feature electronic poll books, allowing poll workers to more quickly check-in voters. And after being criticized for abandoning the board’s once-active Twitter account, Tatum said that employees would be more closely monitoring the board’s Twitter feed for complaints during early voting and on Election Day.

Early voting will run from April 8-20 in the Old Council Chambers of 441 Fourth Street NW.