Election experts look toward 2026 with urgency, caution and signs of progress

Election officials are heading into the 2026 cycle facing familiar pressures in new combinations: rapid legal and technological change, persistent distrust, workforce turnover, evolving security threats and a communications environment in which false claims and public confusion can spread faster than offices can respond.

That was the central theme of a recent conversation hosted by Ready for Tuesday featuring five election administration experts from across the field’s support ecosystem: Bonnie Chang of The Elections Group, Whitney Quesenbery of the Center for Civic Design, Steve Lund of U.S. Digital Response, Spencer Wood of the Election Security Exchange and Noah Praetz of Ready for Tuesday.

The panelists brought different perspectives, including design, security, technology, training and organizational leadership. But their assessments of the coming cycle converged around several points: the pace of change remains relentless, the field is more professionalized than it was a decade ago, and the work of maintaining public trust has become both more urgent and more complex.

A field preparing for uncertainty

Asked what election officials need to understand about 2026, Praetz pointed to volatility across nearly every part of the election environment.

“Every year there’s a new challenge,” he said, citing foreign interference, cybersecurity, public health, expanded voting by mail and other pressures that have shaped recent cycles. This year, he said, the dominant feeling is the need to be “ready for anything.”

Praetz said election officials are contending with legal and regulatory changes, shifting maps, potential process changes and deadlines that continue to compress.

Quesenbery said one of the central challenges is the imbalance between how quickly false information can spread and how slowly institutions must move to correct procedures, materials or public understanding.

False or incomplete claims can circulate quickly, Quesenbery said, while the work of correcting the public record is often slow and procedural. Addressing problems, she added, often requires reviewing procedures, revising materials, testing changes and training staff before a public-facing correction can fully take hold.

Lund said trust remains a defining issue. He noted that while confidence in elections rose after the 2024 election, that improvement has begun to erode. Distrust, he said, affects not only public perception but also how election offices do their work, who they collaborate with and how consequential even minor mistakes can become.

Chang said the challenge is not any one issue, but the fact that so many are arriving at once.

“It’s not just that these challenges are building and building,” she said. “They’re arriving all at the same time.”

That creates a kind of cognitive and operational burden, she said, that is often difficult for those outside election offices to fully appreciate.

Wood emphasized that the same conditions also reveal one of the field’s strengths.

“Election professionals are some of the most resilient planners I have ever met,” he said. “There are not a lot of professionals who can deal with all of these issues on a fixed deadline and deliver. Every single time.”

Quiet gains and growing professionalization

The panelists also identified areas where the field has made meaningful progress.

Wood pointed to the growing adoption of all-hazards planning, including election offices building security working groups and formalizing relationships with emergency managers, law enforcement, fire officials and other community partners.

Quesenbery cited the cumulative value of routine, successful elections. Special elections and local contests that proceed smoothly, she said, may not attract much public attention, but they build capacity and confidence over time. She also said she has seen more election offices planning not only for the next election, but for where they want to be in 2027.

Praetz highlighted the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence’s development of national standards for election administration, calling them a “North Star” for the field.

Lund said the Alliance’s office-level certification program is also significant because it gives election offices a venue to learn from one another, share best practices and collaborate across jurisdictions.

Chang, who recently left a local election office in Wisconsin before joining The Elections Group, described a partnership between her former office and a University of Wisconsin design professor. Students surveyed early voting sites during the primary and then helped create materials for first-time voters ahead of the April election.

Quesenbery also pointed to the MIT Election Performance Index as a sign of progress, saying states appear to be clustering more closely together on key measures. The distribution, she said, suggests that more jurisdictions are moving toward consistent performance.

Persistent pressure points

Despite those gains, panelists said election offices continue to face major structural challenges.

Wood said one of the Election Security Exchange’s core goals is to make complex security guidance easier for election officials to use. He described the organization’s “bite, snack, meal” approach: short resources for quick reference, mid-length materials for deeper understanding and more comprehensive guidance for offices ready to dig into a topic.

Lund said the range of expertise expected of election officials remains unusually broad.

“Election officials are expected to be an expert in just about everything,” he said, naming logistics, technology, training, hiring, communications, research and cybersecurity among the demands.

Quesenbery said the field needs clearer pathways that help election officials access specialized knowledge without expecting them to become full-time experts in every discipline.

Workforce turnover remains another major concern. Chang said experienced administrators continue to leave the field, often taking decades of institutional knowledge with them. For too long, she said, election administration has lacked the kind of professional pipeline and support infrastructure needed to preserve and transfer that knowledge.

Communications and public trust also remain central. Praetz said election offices are now communicating not only with voters who trust them, but also with skeptical observers looking for reasons to doubt the process.

“If we get that right, a lot of the other stuff takes care of itself,” he said.

The challenge, he said, is no longer just publishing data. Election offices must provide context, explain what people are seeing and make routine processes understandable to audiences watching in real time.

AI, mail voting and implementation challenges ahead

When the discussion turned to emerging issues, artificial intelligence quickly became the dominant topic.

Wood said AI is likely to reshape the election security environment, not necessarily by changing the underlying risks, but by increasing the volume and speed of potential threats.

Lund said election officials’ conversations about AI have changed over the past year. Many have moved from thinking about AI only as a threat to asking how it might be used responsibly in their own work.

He cited U.S. Digital Response’s work with Doña Ana County, N.M., to develop an AI translation assistant that keeps humans in the loop while helping the office meet Voting Rights Act language requirements more efficiently.

Lund also raised a longer-term question: What happens if voters increasingly receive election information through large language models or other AI tools rather than directly from election offices?

The future of the U.S. Postal Service and mail ballot legislation also emerged as an open question. Lund said changes to mail infrastructure or voting-by-mail rules could have significant operational consequences for election administrators.

Quesenbery said she is watching voter ID requirements, not primarily as a policy debate, but as an implementation challenge. Whether those procedures work well, she said, will depend heavily on how laws are written and how rules are translated into actual voter-facing processes.

Her team is also developing what she called a “When Something Happens” framework, focused on helping offices communicate during moments of uncertainty, before all facts are known but while the public still needs to hear from trusted sources.

Praetz said he is focused on the growing importance of storytelling in election administration. Offices are operating in an environment where cameras, livestreams, public records, social media and raw data can make routine processes visible without necessarily making them understandable.

Election officials, he said, must help the public understand not only what they are seeing, but why it matters and how it fits into the larger process.

Reasons for hope

The conversation closed with a question about what gives the panelists hope, and their answers returned again and again to the people doing the work.

Praetz said his hope comes from election officials themselves. Lund said they continue to amaze him, even as he wished they could have “a more average day more often.” Wood put it simply: “Election officials are awesome.”

Quesenbery said she has been encouraged by hearing people across the political spectrum return to a basic democratic principle: making sure every vote counts.

Chang closed by recognizing the local workers who staff polling places, manage drop boxes and carry out the daily work of making elections accessible in their communities.

“You are the ones making that possible,” she said.