The Chicago Board of Elections has big hopes to double the number of vote centers for future elections after voters faced long lines, but looming budget crises are prompting some City Council members to float consolidation of the office instead.During the board’s annual budget hearing Tuesday, several alderpersons raised the need to consolidate the Chicago Board of Elections with the Cook County Clerk’s Office. The budget watchdog The Civic Federation and a collaborative of county and city officials had previously recommended the move more than a decade ago, with officials estimating savings between $5-10 million annually.“We are in budget crises now, year after year after year,” said Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd). “Every department, every agency has to start looking at ways to streamline, to become more productive and exploring potential savings.”Adam Lasker, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners’ general counsel, said he doesn’t see where costs would be saved in consolidating the two election boards, considering the infrastructure — from polling sites to machines — that would still be needed. And he warned that such a move could put Chicago taxpayers on the hook for operating county elections that the city doesn’t oversee, such as township elections.“There’s not a lot of redundancy really,” Lasker said. “So I would just ask you to show us where that cost savings really comes from.”Consolidating the election authorities would require legislation to be passed in Springfield. A spokeswoman for Cook County Clerk Monica Gordon did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday on whether she supports consolidation.With early voting gaining popularity, the board is hoping to expand its 52 vote centers that are open for early voting and on election day. By the 2028 election, the board hopes to add an additional vote center in each ward for two each, bringing the total to 102 throughout the city. Adding 50 new vote centers, which any voter can cast a ballot from regardless of where they live in the city, would cost an additional $10 million per election cycle, said board spokesman Max Bever. Hopes for a dramatic expansion come amid a declining budget. The board is funded through both the city of Chicago and Cook County, and its budget seesaws between sharp increases and dips depending on whether it’s an election year. With no elections scheduled for 2025, the board’s city budget is expected to see a 17.3% decrease next year to a proposed $28.5 million.If funding can’t be secured to open an additional 50 vote centers, the board would aim to open 10 new vote centers to start, said Executive Director Charles Holiday, Jr. But with chances for new funding slim as the city works to close a nearly $1 billion dollar budget gap for next year and similarly large deficits forecasted for the next several years, precinct consolidation is one way the board is eyeing potentially funding an expansion.The board has saved about $2 million per election by reducing the number of precincts by 40% from 2,069 to 1,290 in 2022, Bever said. But the cost savings also came with a reduction in the number of polling places with bilingual language support.Some alderpersons expressed concerns about how precinct consolidation may affect turnout.“A lot of my, for example, seniors — they’re not going to vote by mail and they’re not going to go to early voting. They’re going to wait until the day of the election to go vote. So in places where I have a great deal of seniors, I need more than one precinct,” said Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd). But simply adding more vote centers doesn’t solve the entire issue either, said Robert Stein, a Rice University political science professor who has extensively studied vote centers' effect on voter behavior. Execution and implementation matters. It’s why Stein said he studied how the Transportation Security Administration handles lines at airports and how Starbucks chooses to locate stores — sometimes with one on each side of the same street.“They require a very careful calibration of where and when voters want to vote,” Stein said.Vote centers need to be housed in large buildings so lines don’t build up, be accessible and easy to access via both public transport and with plenty of parking and have enough voting machines and poll workers.Some vote centers during the November presidential election saw long lines that lasted upwards of four and five hours, Bever said. The Chicago Board of Elections is working toward setting up live wait-time tracking that Bever hopes will eventually be available on a forthcoming app. Having more vote centers open during early voting, can hopefully help hours-long lines, Bever said.“Thinking of it more like a full voting election month — that's how voters are treating it,” Bever said. “And that's something that would definitely be helpful to avoiding the type of bottlenecks we saw on the weekend leading up to election day for this last presidential election.”Tessa Weinberg covers Chicago government and politics for WBEZ.