As we approach the 2026 midterms, we are officially nine months out from Election Day. For municipal and local government leaders, the clock isn't just ticking—it’s already in motion. In our experience, adversaries don’t wait for November to start their work; they are already probing networks, testing defenses, and scanning for vulnerabilities months before the first ballot is cast.
In this environment, election integrity is an operational priority that depends entirely on how well we anticipate and detect threats today.
1. Audit Your Reality Before an Adversary Does
Many municipal operations are built on a bespoke mix of legacy IT, third-party software, and an often-overworked staff. This isn't just an IT hurdle; it’s a structural risk that can extend and weaken threat surfaces. Recognizing this, security requires a mental shift:
- View your ecosystem as a living mesh: Systems cannot be treated as discrete silos. Identify and assess the dependencies between voter registration databases, public-facing sites, and reporting infrastructure. These are the high-value targets because they control the narrative on election night.
- Fixing CVE’s doesn’t eliminate vulnerabilities: Don't just patch high-severity weaknesses in your systems, as this is only a part of the exposure. Conduct penetration tests that look for "linkable" weaknesses—minor flaws that an attacker can chain together to create a major impact.
- Share the responsibility: Security isn’t just an IT problem. Protection involves HR to strengthen temporary staff onboarding, procurement to document processes for third-party access requests, and the legal team for incident response and communication policies.
2. Adopt and Invest in Continuous Monitoring
The most dangerous attacks will not be noisy. They're subtle, like a small number of activities with a stolen user credential, or a minor configuration change to a critical asset. As a result, you need to be thoughtful, and creative, in how you structure your monitoring.
- Watch What Matters: You can’t monitor everything with the same intensity. Define critical paths, services, and assets, and focus your resources there.
- Prepare for Distractions: Sometimes a DDoS attack isn't the main event—it’s a smokescreen designed to overwhelm your team while a more subtle intrusion happens elsewhere.
- Hunt for Threats: Automated alerts are not enough, and some compromises may have already occurred. Schedule proactive hunts for compromised admin accounts, systems, and service account abuse before you lock down or mirror critical systems.
3. Design for Controlled Failure
The goal isn’t going to perfect security; success is speedy identification and disruption of events that arise. A solid security posture assumes that something will go wrong and is designed to limit the blast radius, provide context for remediation, and informs control improvements to eliminate the opportunity for a recurrence.
- Field Test Your Recovery Plan: A response plan, backup, or failover, can’t be relied upon unless you’ve tested the disruption/restoration process under real-world pressure.
- Segment Seriously: Election systems should be physically and logically isolated from general municipal networks as much as is possible. The security of the election infrastructure is weakened by any vulnerable network or service that is allowed to connect to it, as attacks spread by moving laterally.
- Embrace the Chaos: Run tabletop exercises that simulate compromises, ransomwares, and denial of service attacks or coordinated misinformation campaigns during election progress and result reporting. Documenting messages, approval chains, and spokespeople who will talk to the media and the public during a crisis is just as important as the technical fixes involved.
The 2026 Operational Roadmap
Month
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Objective
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February
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Identify stakeholders, review data sources, and scope penetration tests.
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March
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Formalize the project plan, ownership, and technical dependencies.
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May
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Start threat intel tracking and formalize offensive security strategies.
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August
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Validate vulnerability management and confirm pre-election risk reduction.
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September
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Enter "Heightened Monitoring": Weekly reporting, war rooms, and active threat hunting.
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November
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Election Day: Continuous hunting, real-time threat reporting, and stakeholder sync.
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Pro Tip: Create unique communication threads for engineering, analysts, threat intel, and communications, but keep one "all-hands" thread for high-level collaboration.
The Bottom Line
The municipalities that survive the 2026 cycle with their reputations intact won't be the ones scrambling for last-minute fixes in October. They will be the ones that treated preparation as a discipline.
Start now. Tighten your posture. Reduce uncertainty.
If you need a partner to help you navigate these midterms, reach out to our experts today.
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