Happy New Year, everyone! As we close the door on 2025 and open a new one in 2026, it feels like the right moment to pause and reflect—not only on the past year, but on the surprising fact that The Turnout has now been in business for ten years—a whole decade. I’m still processing that.

When I started this company, it wasn’t with a master plan or a grand vision. I enjoyed the idea of working with various agencies, learning about their internal processes, and collaborating with them to enhance the systems and day-to-day operations that keep them running smoothly. My belief, then and now, is simple: the more efficiently an agency operates within its statutory environment, the better it can meet the needs of the people and organizations that depend on it.

In the early days, I wasn’t even sure how long I’d keep the business. I might end up back in an office somewhere, which is how I ended up with a somewhat whimsical domain name. "All I need is a business name and a domain for an email address," I thought. And yes, I still get trolled by a friend for it. But you know what, Ryan? The Turnout does dot rock.

Over the past ten years, what started as just me has become a team of six, supported by specialized consultants whose expertise makes our work possible. Our capabilities expanded right along with the team—from custom development and data analysis to process modeling, policy analysis, and cybersecurity. After years of collaboration with the Center for Internet Security, we now have our first product: RABET-V™.

2025: A Year of Big Steps

The past year was especially significant for RABET-V. The biggest news is that we expanded the program to all products outside the elections space. While initially focused on addressing gaps in verification for election technology, we quickly realized that many areas could benefit from the scope, depth, and speed of the RABET-V program. We are now ready to collaborate with any organization to help improve their security posture and lower their risk exposure.

Early in 2025, The Turnout became the full administrator and operator of the program. CIS continues to update the CIS Controls®, which serve as the foundation of the RABET-V program, and owns the RABET-V trademark. Still, we now facilitate the entire process—something our team has been building toward since we helped create the program in 2019 and supported its operationalization in 2023.

RABET‑V’s footprint also expanded. The South Carolina State Elections Commission requires technology providers to be RABET‑V verified before operating in the state. The Ohio Secretary of State has published security matrices for ballot-on-demand and voter registration systems that include components supported by RABET-V. The Texas Secretary of State uses RABET-V verification for some products on an as-needed basis.

We also verified several products last year, including one from ES&S, the ExpressPoll pollbook, and three from Enhanced Voting: Enhanced Ballot, Enhanced Results, and Ballot Scout. Altogether, eleven products have now gone through RABET‑V, counting those in the pilot.

Looking ahead, the program will continue to evolve. Some of our team members have become authors on a patent for the underlying verification mechanism, thereby strengthening the foundation for what comes next. As we wrote about this year, we’ll also continue to monitor how AI is used in software development and incorporate responsible AI checks into the verification process.

We also added automated security testing as a service for providers of RABET-V-verified products between iterations. Combined with human assessments during each iteration, providers gain an ongoing picture of their security posture—a crucial aspect, especially as the threat landscape evolves.

Our goal with RABET‑V is straightforward: create an ecosystem of technology providers who have access to the latest security practices and demonstrate that they’re using them. We’ll continue to write about the program, raise awareness, and encourage organizations to incorporate RABET-V into their procurement and verification approaches.

2025: Beyond RABET‑V

While RABET‑V played a significant role in our year, it wasn’t the only thing we worked on. Throughout 2025, our team collaborated with clients to strengthen administrative processes, develop data standards, modernize reporting models, and support the implementation and evaluation of technology. Whether we’re working with a single agency or an organization making changes on a national scale, our goal remains the same: to strengthen the administrative systems that support mission delivery.

Events and Engagements

Our team participated in twenty conferences and events in 2025. We began the year in Washington, D.C., at JEOLC, followed by NASED, where we spent time discussing RABET-V and the work of the Council of State Governments (CSG) and the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) on policy and data standardization within the Overseas Voting Initiative (OVI). We've worked with CSG since The Turnout's founding, and the work we do to support military and overseas citizens is one of our most valued projects and partnerships.

Grace and John supported the planning and facilitation of the Election Verification Network's (EVN's) conference in March and the State Certification Testing of Election Systems National Conference (SCTESNC) in June. Grace co-chaired the EVN annual conference with Enhanced Voting's Matt Bernhard, and John served on the SCTESNC Steering Committee and presented at the conference on NIST Common Data Formats and machine-readable SBOMs.

Brian has been exceedingly busy closing out one of our long-running projects with CSG and the US Department of Labor's (DOL's) Office of Apprenticeships, the Apprenticeship Data Alignment and Performance Technical Assistance Center (ADAPTAC). ADAPTAC assisted state officials and apprenticeship sponsors in improving data collection to better align with federal reporting requirements and helped them utilize this data to increase the number and quality of apprenticeship programs nationwide.

I participated in the Nevada Secretary of State's Nevada Election Officials Training Conference (NEOTC) and Elections Demonstration Day. The Elections Demonstration Day brought together vendors who assist the Secretary of State in administering elections. In 2024, we helped create training materials for the new voter registration database. We also developed a data standard, API layout, and data validation program for other Nevada voter registration agencies to use, ensuring they could directly submit data to the new voter registration system while reducing data issues for local election officials to address. The Demo Day provided elected officials and the public with an opportunity to learn about our work and ask questions.

I was the keynote speaker at the National Association of State Chief Administrators (NASCA) Annual Conference in New Orleans, where I delivered a briefing on major cybersecurity events from the past few years. It was an honor to address an audience of professionals on current and emerging issues in cybersecurity. My talk also outlined a way to shield agencies from these issues while preparing for future challenges.

We also participated in two Overseas Voting Initiative working group meetings—one in Seattle and one in San Antonio. I led the technology subgroup, Grace led the policy subgroup, and James delivered a session on data standardization and quality. We concluded our year with CSG by participating in a Northeast road show in December. Starting in 2026, we’ll support OVI in visiting every state to discuss military and overseas citizen voting policy and data standardization.

Publications and Research

In 2025, we published nine articles, including two press releases on RABET‑V milestones. Our writing covered process modeling, common data formats, features of the RABET‑V program, and AI as a security concern in software development.

We also published an article in the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice about our support for the Coalition of Election Association Leaders (CEAL) and the Election Association Maturation Guidebook. The piece included research from our landscape of election associations and previewed upcoming work to support association leaders through strategic planning, bylaws reviews, financial reviews, and more. The data analysis and association maturation modeling we do on CEAL for the Election Center is some of the most exciting work we do.

Webinars and Education

The Elections Group kindly hosted our team for a webinar on RABET‑V, “How to Implement Verification Programs for your Election Office,” which has been viewed more than 700 times on YouTube. We also partnered with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center® (MS-ISAC) for a special webinar on verifying enterprise technology with RABET-V, which drew over 150 government officials.

Looking Ahead: 2026 and Beyond

As we enter our second decade, we’re preparing to help clients navigate increasingly complex operational environments. Agencies are facing staff turnover, expanding statutory requirements, and growing workloads—all of which require structured, repeatable processes to manage effectively.

One of our major initiatives for the coming year is helping agencies establish a Process Modeling Office (PMO). Unlike a traditional project management office, this PMO focuses on building and maintaining accurate process models, facilitating workshops across departments, and using administrative data to simulate workloads and assess resource needs. The goal isn’t just to map processes—it’s to help agencies build ongoing capability to understand and refine their own operations.

A strong PMO also simplifies procurements. When workflows are already mapped and tied to statutory requirements, it becomes much easier to incorporate them into RFPs, especially when paired with RABET‑V for product security assurance.

We also plan to expand our educational efforts, including more writing, webinars, and increased engagement with partners across the election, security, and administrative fields. We hope that by sharing what we’re learning, we can support the broader community as it prepares for the next generation of administrative and technology challenges.

Thank You

None of this work would have happened without our team—Grace, John, James, Brian, and Nancy—whose expertise, patience, and commitment make everything possible. And to our clients: thank you for trusting us to support your missions. If you're our client and feel your work was missing from the above, please don't take an omission from this post as a sign that we care any less about your work. We included our clients who we knew were very public about our involvement. We’re proud of all the work we accomplished together this year.

If the future of our work sounds exciting to you, we’d love to connect. Reach out to our team, follow us on LinkedIn, or sign up for our newsletter—more updates to come.