Hoover Institution (Washington, DC)—On April 23, 2026, the Hoover Institution convened election administrators, computer scientists, legal scholars, political scientists, cybersecurity experts, and policy practitioners in Washington for a daylong discussion launching a long-term project to examine what America’s election system should look like in two decades.
Organized by Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow Benjamin Ginsberg, the meeting brought together participants representing a wide range of perspectives on election administration and reform. Rather than debating recent election controversies, participants looked ahead and asked: how should the election system be improved to strengthen public confidence?
“Our nation made a policy decision more than two centuries ago to have our elections run on a very local level,” Ginsberg noted. “As a result, today we have over 8,000 jurisdictions responsible for the casting, counting, and certification of votes. That results in inconsistencies among jurisdictions and an overall lack of funding to make improvements. The goal is to design an election system of the future whose security and accessibility gives the public confidence in the results it produces while taking into account the different needs of different jurisdictions.”
A recurring theme was the distinction between trustworthiness and trust. Participants generally agreed that the election system will not meet its burden if citizens lack confidence in the processes that produce election outcomes. Transparency, understandable procedures, bipartisan oversight, accessibility, security, and effective public communication were repeatedly identified as essential components in sustaining confidence in elections. Several participants noted that public perceptions are increasingly shaped by national political and media narratives, creating challenges even for well-administered local election systems.
The group devoted considerable attention to the long-standing balance between decentralization and standardization. Participants recognized important advantages to the nation’s decentralized system, including local responsiveness, innovation, and resilience against single points of failure. At the same time, growing cybersecurity demands, increasingly complex regulatory requirements, and aging election infrastructure suggest that certain functions—such as cybersecurity, equipment standards, voter registration maintenance, and compliance—may benefit from greater coordination and consistency. Rather than endorsing either extreme, many participants suggested that future reforms should evaluate election administration function by function to determine the appropriate level of local autonomy and centralized support.
Technology emerged as both an opportunity and a challenge. Participants discussed advances in end-to-end verifiable voting systems, risk-limiting audits, open-source software, and continuous system monitoring as promising tools for election assurance. There was broad interest in expanding post-election auditing and adopting technologies that reduce reliance on trust in software alone through independently verifiable processes. At the same time, participants expressed caution about emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and internet voting. While AI may eventually improve administrative efficiency and assist with auditing, voter-roll maintenance, and cybersecurity, participants emphasized that its implications for election administration remain uncertain. Similarly, despite changing public expectations around digital services, there was broad agreement that internet voting presents significant unresolved security and verification challenges.
Several sessions focused on envisioning what core election administration functions could look like in two decades, including voter registration systems, maintenance of accurate rolls, evolving voting modalities, and the future of election auditing. Participants explored the possibilities of improving data sharing among state agencies and between states, better tracking of voter mobility, strengthening and expanding post-election audits, and modernizing procedures established under earlier federal election laws. Discussions also examined how changing patterns of early voting, mail voting, and in-person voting will continue to shape election administration, while recognizing that each voting modality involves tradeoffs among accessibility, security, cost, and voter confidence.
From the diverse professional and ideological perspectives of the participants, the discussion identified several areas for continued inquiry. These include how to allocate responsibilities between local and state election authorities; how advances in AI, cybersecurity, and other technologies should be incorporated into voting and election administration; how best to communicate technical safeguards to the public; and how election systems can simultaneously strengthen security, accessibility, and public confidence.
“So much public attention is given to election administration policies where the two parties seem impossibly divided,” said Justin Grimmer, Hoover Senior Fellow and Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy in Stanford University’s Department of Political Science. “But what we found at our meeting is that underneath all that public conflict, there are many areas of agreement and the potential for compromise in designing the election system of the future. Our meeting uncovered those areas, including ways to bolster security, participation, and the accuracy of registration files.”
The convening underscored that the future of election administration will depend not only on technological innovation but also on thoughtful institutional design, effective public administration, and sustained efforts to reinforce public trust in democratic processes.
Learn more about Hoover’s Improving American Elections research program here.
