> Then the main question is, is what you're willing to pay to append a record more than what the operators (miners) are willing to accept to append a record? In the case of elections, I don't know a lot of governments that would be willing to pay to do what they do for free today.

If a government is holding fair elections, they should be willing to spend money on the opportunity to prove that they are fair. That being said, you don't actually need mining in an election-based blockchain. Mining/PoW exist to solve the 'double spend' problem - but that's just a race condition. There's no need to worry about race conditions in elections. The global consensus can be computed slowly. The important property that you want is that each individual voter be able to mathematically verify that their own personal vote was counted towards the total, and counted correctly. Blockchains do offer that capability.