Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has launched an election integrity task force charged with stress-testing the state’s voting technology before the 2026 midterms, a move that lands at the center of a national argument over whether America’s election machines are ready for another high-turnout, high-scrutiny cycle. The task force is reviewing touchscreens, ballot scanners, and voter check-in tablets, and it arrives alongside a separate, slower-moving federal effort to recertify voting systems under tougher security rules.
The timing matters. Georgia has been a flashpoint in election-security debates since 2020, and with the midterms just weeks away, officials in Atlanta are trying to get ahead of questions about machine reliability before Election Day rather than after it. There is no indication that Georgia’s voting machines were tampered with during an election, but the state does have a documented history of programming errors producing inaccurate vote counts, and that history is shaping how seriously this task force is being taken.
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Who Sits on Raffensperger’s Election Integrity Task Force
Raffensperger assembled a bipartisan-leaning roster for the task force, pulling in figures with decades of combined experience in Georgia politics. The group includes former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, U.S. Representative Drew Ferguson, former Governor Roy Barnes, and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. That mix spans both parties and multiple eras of Georgia governance, which appears to be the point: a task force stacked with only one party’s appointees would struggle to carry credibility in a state where election outcomes have been litigated and relitigated since the 2020 cycle.
The table below summarizes the task force’s publicly known composition.
| Name | Prior Role | Task Force Function |
|---|---|---|
| Brad Raffensperger | Georgia Secretary of State | Task force lead / convener |
| Saxby Chambliss | Former U.S. Senator (Georgia) | Member |
| Drew Ferguson | U.S. Representative (Georgia) | Member |
| Roy Barnes | Former Georgia Governor | Member |
| Shirley Franklin | Former Atlanta Mayor | Member |
Beyond the named members, the state’s election-security apparatus has been testing equipment and running scenario drills with input from career election officials, not just the task force’s political appointees, a detail that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported on as part of its broader coverage of Georgia’s election workforce bracing for a tense midterm season.
What’s Actually Being Tested: Touchscreens, Scanners, Tablets
The task force’s mandate, as reported, centers on three categories of hardware that Georgia voters interact with directly: voting touchscreens, ballot scanners, and the check-in tablets poll workers use to verify voter registration at precincts. These are the components most likely to be touched, photographed, and scrutinized by voters and poll watchers alike, which makes them the highest-visibility targets for both legitimate security testing and the kind of viral misinformation that spread rapidly during the 2020 cycle.
Touchscreen voting units are the part of the system most voters actually see and use, and they have historically drawn the most public skepticism, partly because they introduce a layer of software between a voter’s choice and the paper record of that choice. Ballot scanners, which tabulate the paper ballots or paper trails produced by the touchscreens, are the next link in the chain, and check-in tablets sit at the front end of the process, determining whether a voter is cleared to receive a ballot in the first place. Testing all three together reflects an understanding that election security isn’t a single point of failure; it’s a chain, and the task force appears to be treating it that way.
Election-security researchers have long argued that the real risk in these systems isn’t necessarily a single dramatic hack on Election Day, but a cumulative set of smaller software-integrity gaps that compound across a statewide deployment touching thousands of precincts.
Tabletop Exercises Prepare Officials for Worst-Case Scenarios
Alongside the hardware testing, Georgia election officials have run tabletop exercises covering worst-case scenarios, a standard practice in critical-infrastructure security but one that carries extra weight in an election context. Tabletop exercises are scripted simulations where officials walk through hypothetical failures, outages, or attacks step by step, without touching live systems, to identify where response plans break down before they’re needed for real.
For election administrators, these drills typically simulate scenarios like a scanner outage at a high-turnout precinct, a check-in tablet network failure, or a public claim of tampering that has to be investigated and either confirmed or debunked in near-real time, all while polls remain open and a clock is running. The value of the exercise isn’t just technical; it’s about making sure the public communication plan is as tested as the equipment, since a security scare that’s handled clumsily in public can do as much damage to confidence in an election as an actual vulnerability would.
Georgia election official Salleigh Grubbs has been direct about the stakes of getting this right before voters go to the polls. “We cannot continue on the same path with these kinds of vulnerabilities,” Grubbs said, according to The Current GA. She added that the concerns “must be addressed before the November election so that we can continue on to secure all future elections,” underscoring that the task force’s timeline isn’t just about this cycle but about the credibility of Georgia’s election infrastructure going forward.
No Evidence of Tampering, But a History That Still Stings
It’s worth stating plainly what the available reporting does and does not show. There is no indication that Georgia’s voting machines were tampered with during an actual election. That distinction gets lost quickly in public discourse, where “vulnerability” and “breach” are often used interchangeably even though they describe very different levels of risk. A system can have a theoretical weakness that a security researcher can demonstrate in a lab environment without that weakness ever having been exploited in a real election.
What Georgia does have on the record is a history of programming errors that have previously caused inaccurate vote counts. Programming errors are distinct from hacking; they’re mistakes in how ballots, districts, or candidate data are configured into the voting system software, and they can produce wrong tallies without any malicious actor being involved at all. That history is exactly why a task force focused on pre-election testing, rather than waiting to react to a problem on Election Night, makes sense as a strategy, and it’s also why critics who conflate “programming error” with “rigged election” are talking past the actual documented risk.
University of Michigan computer-science professor and longtime election-security researcher J. Alex Halderman has framed the broader concern around ballot-marking devices succinctly: “Fundamentally, it’s a problem any time that you’re going to put a potentially vulnerable computer between the voter and the only records of their vote,” Halderman said in comments carried by PBS. His point isn’t that Georgia’s machines have been compromised; it’s that any computer sitting between a voter’s intent and the paper record of that intent is, by definition, a piece of the system that has to be independently auditable.
The Federal Backstop: EAC’s VVSG 2.0 Certification Race
Georgia’s task force isn’t operating in isolation. At the federal level, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has been running its own slower-moving overhaul of voting-system standards, known as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0, or VVSG 2.0. As of May 2026, the EAC reported that two voting systems had been certified under VVSG 2.0, with five additional systems still in testing. That’s a meaningful but incomplete rollout heading into a midterm cycle, and it illustrates how far the industry still has to go before VVSG 2.0 becomes the baseline rather than the exception.
| Metric | Status as of May 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Voting systems certified under VVSG 2.0 | 2 | U.S. Election Assistance Commission |
| Voting systems in active VVSG 2.0 testing | 5 | U.S. Election Assistance Commission |
| VVSG 2.0 core requirement areas | Software integrity, auditability, system-wide security | U.S. Election Assistance Commission |
| Known vendor submitting a second system | ES&S | GlobeNewswire |
Election-equipment vendor ES&S confirmed it has submitted a second voting system for VVSG 2.0 certification, according to a company announcement distributed via GlobeNewswire. A second submission from one of the country’s largest voting-equipment suppliers signals that vendors see VVSG 2.0 compliance as a competitive necessity, not a box-checking exercise, especially as more states start writing the newer standard into their procurement requirements.
What VVSG 2.0 Actually Requires From Voting-System Vendors
VVSG 2.0 isn’t a single checkbox; it’s a bundle of requirements addressing software integrity, auditability, and system-wide security. In plain terms, software integrity means a voting system has to be able to prove that only approved, unaltered software is running on it at any given time, closing off the possibility that unauthorized code could be loaded onto a machine between certification and Election Day. Auditability means the system has to produce records, typically paper-based, that can be independently checked against the electronic tally without having to trust the software’s own self-reporting. System-wide security wraps both of those together with broader protections against network intrusion, physical tampering, and supply-chain risk.
Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks, testified to Georgia lawmakers evaluating replacement voting systems and put the software-integrity requirement at the top of the list. “The number one security feature you want is software integrity on your systems, which is strong certainty that the software that’s running on the system is only approved software,” Adida said, according to WRDW. When a state senator pressed him to name the single most important feature for a hand-marked-paper-ballot system, Adida demurred before answering, calling it “like picking my favorite child,” a comment that captures just how many overlapping security properties a modern voting system has to satisfy simultaneously.
Vendors Pitch Georgia Lawmakers on a Systems Overhaul
Georgia’s task force work is unfolding alongside a parallel track at the state legislature, where voting-system vendors have been making their case directly to lawmakers who are weighing whether to replace the state’s current equipment entirely. That overlap, state-level task force testing on one track and vendor pitches to legislators on another, means Georgia is effectively running two simultaneous reviews of its election infrastructure at once, which raises the stakes for both to reach consistent conclusions before any procurement decisions get made.
That dynamic has been evident in testimony before Georgia lawmakers, where vendors have had to answer pointed questions about the security tradeoffs of different ballot technologies, from fully electronic touchscreens to hand-marked paper ballots scanned by machine. There is no confirmed taskforce product list, vendor shortlist, or pricing information in the available reporting, so any claim about which specific system Georgia will ultimately choose should be treated as speculation rather than fact at this stage.
What is confirmed is that the conversation has moved from abstract policy debate to concrete vendor testimony, a shift Atlanta News First has covered as state lawmakers weigh whether and how to replace Georgia’s voting systems. That’s a meaningfully different stage of the process than simply announcing a task force; it suggests Georgia’s legislature is treating a potential equipment overhaul as a live possibility for after this midterm cycle, not a distant hypothetical.
What Election-Security Experts Are Saying
Taken together, the expert commentary around Georgia’s review points to a consistent theme: the people closest to election-security testing are not claiming the current system has been breached, but they are warning that the margin for error is thin and shrinking as scrutiny intensifies. Halderman’s warning about computers sitting between voters and their vote records, Adida’s emphasis on software integrity as the baseline requirement, and Grubbs’s insistence that vulnerabilities “must be addressed before the November election” all point in the same direction: fix it now, while there’s still time, rather than explain it after the fact.
That framing also helps explain why Georgia assembled a task force with political heavyweights from both parties rather than leaving the review entirely to career technologists. A purely technical audit can confirm or rule out specific vulnerabilities, but it can’t by itself rebuild public trust in an outcome, especially in a state where election results have become a recurring flashpoint. Pairing the technical testing with visible, bipartisan political sign-off appears to be Raffensperger’s attempt to address both problems at once.
This Isn’t Georgia’s First Scrutiny Rodeo
Georgia’s current review doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The state has been under an unusually bright spotlight on election administration since the 2020 presidential election, when its results were contested, recounted, and audited multiple times. That period cemented Georgia as one of the most closely watched states in the country on anything touching voting technology, and it means every subsequent announcement, including this task force, gets read through the lens of that earlier controversy whether state officials want it to or not.
The state’s documented history of programming errors causing inaccurate vote counts predates the current task force and has been a recurring, if lower-profile, concern among election administrators for years. What’s different in 2026 is the combination of that history with a hardened federal certification standard in VVSG 2.0 and a midterm cycle that national political figures on both sides are treating as pivotal. The Christian Science Monitor has described the broader test facing Georgia’s democratic process this cycle as one where long-standing assumptions, including the sanctity of the secret ballot itself, are being examined in new ways.
How Georgia’s Response Compares With Other States
Georgia is far from the only state grappling with how to modernize voting technology under tightening security standards, but its combination of a high-profile political task force and active vendor-replacement discussions sets it apart from many peers who are quietly waiting on VVSG 2.0 certification to mature before making procurement decisions. With only two systems fully certified and five more in the pipeline as of May 2026, most states have limited options if they wanted to switch to VVSG 2.0-certified equipment today, which makes Georgia’s parallel-track approach, testing existing equipment now while entertaining vendor pitches for the future, a pragmatic response to a certification bottleneck rather than a sign that Georgia is moving faster than it should.
That bottleneck also explains why last-minute election-technology overhauls carry real operational risk. StateScoop has reported on the high cost of late-cycle technical changes to election systems, a dynamic that cuts both ways for Georgia: moving too fast on a wholesale equipment swap right before a midterm could introduce its own operational risk, while moving too slowly risks entering the 2028 presidential cycle with equipment that critics will say wasn’t adequately modernized after years of warnings.
Market Impact: What This Means for Vendors and County Budgets
For voting-equipment vendors, Georgia’s task force and the parallel legislative review represent a potentially significant contract opportunity, but also a reputational one. ES&S’s move to submit a second system for VVSG 2.0 certification suggests the company is positioning itself to compete for whatever procurement decisions Georgia, or other states watching Georgia’s process, make in the coming budget cycles. VotingWorks’ public testimony, delivered by Adida directly to Georgia lawmakers, similarly reads as an attempt to shape procurement criteria around the software-integrity and auditability requirements the company has built its own systems around.
For counties, the calculus is less about competitive positioning and more about budget exposure. Election equipment is typically funded at the county or state level, and a wholesale replacement cycle, if Georgia’s legislature ultimately decides to pursue one, would represent a major capital expense layered on top of the testing, training, and tabletop-exercise costs the task force’s work is already generating. None of the available reporting includes confirmed pricing or budget figures for a potential statewide equipment replacement, so any specific cost estimate at this stage would be speculative.
5 Predictions for the Road to November 2026
Based on the current trajectory of Georgia’s task force work, the EAC’s certification pipeline, and the legislative vendor hearings, a few outcomes look more likely than others heading toward Election Day.
- Georgia’s task force will likely issue public findings or recommendations before the midterms rather than after, given officials’ stated urgency about addressing vulnerabilities before November.
- The EAC’s VVSG 2.0 certification count will probably rise above its May 2026 level of two certified systems by year-end, as more vendors like ES&S push submissions through the pipeline.
- Georgia’s legislature is unlikely to finalize a full voting-system replacement before this midterm cycle, given the compressed timeline and the ongoing vendor-testimony phase, making any switch more plausible for 2027 or later.
- Expect continued public testimony from election-security researchers and vendors alike, as both groups use Georgia’s review as a platform to shape procurement standards that could influence other states.
- Scrutiny of Georgia’s voting technology will intensify, not fade, as November approaches, mirroring the pattern from the 2020 cycle where attention peaked closest to and immediately after Election Day.
None of these are certainties, and the available reporting does not confirm a specific release date for the task force’s findings or a timeline for any legislative vote on equipment replacement. They represent reasonable extrapolations from the current pace of activity, not confirmed outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Georgia’s election integrity task force?
It’s a group convened by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ahead of the 2026 midterms to review and test Georgia’s voting technology, including touchscreens, ballot scanners, and voter check-in tablets, before the November election.
Who is on the task force?
Confirmed members include former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, U.S. Representative Drew Ferguson, former Governor Roy Barnes, and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, alongside Raffensperger as the convening official.
Has Georgia found evidence that its voting machines were hacked or tampered with?
No. There is no indication that Georgia’s voting machines were tampered with during an election. The state does have a history of programming errors that previously caused inaccurate vote counts, which is a separate issue from tampering or hacking.
What is VVSG 2.0?
VVSG 2.0 stands for Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0, a federal certification standard maintained by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It includes requirements for software integrity, auditability, and system-wide security in voting equipment.
How many voting systems are certified under VVSG 2.0?
As of May 2026, the EAC reported two voting systems certified under VVSG 2.0, with five additional systems in active testing.
Is Georgia planning to replace its voting machines?
Georgia lawmakers have heard testimony from voting-system vendors about potential replacement options, but no confirmed decision, product list, or timeline for a statewide equipment replacement has been reported.
What is software integrity in voting systems?
It refers to a voting system’s ability to verify that only approved, unaltered software is running on its machines, preventing unauthorized code from being loaded between certification and use on Election Day.
Why does this matter for the 2026 midterms specifically?
Georgia has been a closely watched state on election administration since 2020, and officials are trying to resolve testing and security questions before polls open in November rather than respond to disputes after votes are counted.
