Ballots cost money.
They were rolling in campaign cash. Maybe the ballots were printed on yellow paper?
Actually, it is the ballots that are cheap. You can buy ballots for a given area directly from the printer...if you know who supplies them. They will take your money and give you 10,000 printed ballots, no questions asked.
And getting the list of voters for names is cheap. Free in some localities, $40 in others for a million names.
What is expensive is getting the people to create fraudulent ballots and illegally inject them into the voting process.