SRG’s scenario exercise methodology lets political operators, coalitions, agencies, democracy organizations, and other institutions — including those that do not run elections — test trust signals, convergence, contingencies, and communication when the election security environment starts moving faster than the process.
The environment can change quickly. The decisions still belong to someone.
CISA has cut more than a third of its staff and halted most election programs.
Senate oversight reports no intelligence-community election threat products for 2026; $39.6M in appropriated funds sits unreleased.
China, Iran, and Russia are positioned for the midterms; the federal center built to counter them is closed.
Candidate deepfakes deployed this cycle by a national party committee; federal rules cover robocalls, little else.
67% of Americans are concerned about political leaders pressuring election officials to change outcomes.
The attack surface now includes campaign staff, fundraising platforms, and lookalike donation domains.
Election security extends beyond the systems that count votes. The decisions spread outward.
National pressure lands on different capabilities.
The same executive order, policy, funding decision, court action, security warning, or communications problem may become a staffing constraint in one place, an authority question in another, a coordination problem somewhere else, or a trust problem for the people expected to make it work in practice.
What is a vulnerability in one place may be a strength in another.
SRG starts with the operating environment that actually exists: the authorities, competencies, relationships, institutional memory, capacity, trust, and capabilities already on the ground.
The pressure changes shape because the system it lands in is different.
Readiness is not a national condition. It is an operating condition.
Foreign influence. Synthetic media. Legal uncertainty. Threats. Cyber pressure. Public communication.Each has its own experts. The consequential decision rarely stays in one lane.
Same environment. Different pictures of the problem. SRG tests what happens at the interfaces.
Plans depend on information, authority, coordination, and capacity being available when expected. But organizations do not begin from the same place.
Some already have mature relationships, experienced teams, trusted channels, or strong fallback capacity. Others may be exposed somewhere entirely different.
SRG makes the dependency variable — then tests what the system that actually exists can absorb, route around, or adapt to.
Demo interactions may be recorded and analyzed in aggregate to improve SRG’s exercise methodology.
Since dawn, a regional telecom outage has cut phone and internet service across parts of two counties. Across town, a chemical release at a rail yard has pulled the sheriff’s office and county emergency staff into a shelter-in-place response. Voting systems are unaffected. Early voting opens in three days.
Systems are fine. Its public phone line is down. Staff are reaching voters through the county’s social accounts. Asks whether to announce the early voting opening now or hold.
Stood up a status page within the hour and confirmed the early voting schedule is unchanged. Cannot yet say whether Friday’s court ruling on the mail ballot cure deadline applies to these counties.
Shelter-in-place covers one precinct area. No timeline. The joint information center is issuing all public messages and has asked other offices to hold theirs.
Friday’s ruling changed the cure deadline for mail ballots. Two readings of it are circulating. A formal opinion is expected “this week.”
A regional outlet is reporting that “voting is disrupted” in the two counties. Wants comment by five.
A community organization with a 40,000-number text list offers to carry official messages. It also asks what to tell people.
Nothing here is false. Nothing here is complete.
The incident got your attention. The exercise was testing the decision system around it.
The exercise shows where capability already exists — and what can be built from it.
Muscle memory is built in decisions, not declarations.
This is one moment of one method. A full exercise adds partners, time pressure, and a facilitator who keeps changing the conditions.
Designed and facilitated around one evolving situation, built with you — for a single organization or a network of institutions and partners. One design question governs who is in the room: who must exchange information or make consequential decisions with one another when these pressures intersect?
Identify the decisions, dependencies, relationships, assumptions, strengths, and constraints actually worth testing.
Put the right people inside one evolving environment and make them decide.
Show what held, what compensated, what slowed, what nobody owned, and what needs attention next.
Focused formats can be scoped and delivered beginning in October. SRG can remain engaged through Election Day and beyond with rapid analysis, decision support, strategic and rapid-response communications, after-action review, data synthesis, and advisory support.
A 60–90 day engagement extends the exercise rather than replacing it: the same decisions, dependencies, and relationships, supported while conditions keep changing.
Useful when your organization may have to act, communicate, coordinate, fund, convene, advise, or lead — even though it does not administer the election itself.
Thirty minutes to identify the decisions, dependencies, and relationships worth putting under pressure.