Becoming a president takes a lot of money. This is what it costs to get elected around the world.

From a meager $900,000 to an astounding $352 million, our interactive graphic shows how much it costs to get elected in democracies around the world.The Price of Modern Democracy

Outside the U.S., the more experience a country has with democratic elections, the cheaper that process tends to be.

There is more to the monetary cost of an election than just the funding required by individual candidates to run a competitive campaign. States must allocate a tremendous amount of public funds to run the election itself.

What does a government have to do before voters cast their ballots? Voter lists have to be created from citizen registers. Supplies, such as envelopes and polling booths, have to be bought and transported around the country. Vote counting technology has to be updated, checked and monitored. Election staffers have to be hired and paid, and potential voters have to be educated about the democratic process.

Determining the exact cost of an election is a difficult process, and depending on the methodology, estimates for the same country can vary. However, certain distinct patterns do emerge.

For one, the more experience a country has with multi-party elections, the cheaper their elections tend to be, according to the Electoral Project Network. Costs in Australia, India, Pakistan, Chile, Costa Rica, Brazil and most of Western Europe typically run less than $3 per registered voter. For example, the 2004 general elections in Switzerland and Sweden cost $1 and $2 per voter, while the 2005 races in the U.K. cost $3 per voter. These were the estimates of the United Nations Development Program’s “Global Survey on the Cost of Registration and Elections.”

Elections are pricier—generally between $5 and $10 per voter—in transitional countries with less experience in democracy, like Mexico, Russia, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Those societies that are enduring long-term peacekeeping operations have the highest price tags: Afghanistan ($20 per voter in 2004), Haiti ($11 in 2005) and the Palestinian territories ($15 in 2004) top the list.

Why is that? Although some of the costs associated with voting—like staffing and technology—remain constant or can even grow in a stable nation, others will decline as national security, transportation and communications infrastructures improve.