Election Offices Are Increasingly Using .gov Websites in 2026

Voters look to election office websites for information about how to register and vote. But a bad actor can easily establish a fake election website to deceive voters. The rapid development of widely accessible generative artificial intelligence tools risks making it even easier to create believable spoof websites. Thankfully, the .gov domain serves as a bulwark against impersonation attacks. Only verified U.S. government entities are eligible for a website ending in .gov, giving voters a quick and reliable way to identify official election websites and trust the accuracy of the information displayed.

In 2022, the Center for Democracy & Technology found that only 25% of election websites used the .gov domain. By the 2024 election, we found that share had grown to 31%. We have now updated our analysis and find that adoption has continued to climb: 44% of election websites are now on .gov. This is encouraging progress. In the sections that follow, we explain why a verified web address matters, examine what has driven the gains since 2024, and consider how to sustain that momentum.

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Adoption of .gov Domains Has Increased Since 2022 but Remains Below Half

We analyzed a dataset maintained by the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) consisting of websites and contact information for all local election offices nationwide We found the following changes since our 2024 update:

Of approximately 7,100 unique local election websites, the share using the .gov domain has increased from 31% to 44%. (We should note that this grouping overrepresents states like Wisconsin and Michigan that administer elections at the sub-county level, such as by town.)

Adoption by the approximately 3,000 websites associated with counties and county equivalents increased from 39% to 54%.

Among the 20 most populous counties according to the 2020 Census enumeration, together home to over 60 million Americans, usage of the .gov domain increased from 53% to 68%, with San Bernardino County, CA; Alameda County, CA; and Wayne County, MI, all adopting .gov since our last update. (This analysis considers the 19 unique websites belonging to these 20 counties; Brooklyn, NY, and Queens, NY, both use vote.nyc.)

Why Should Election Offices Have .gov Websites?

Only verified government entities can administer a website with a .gov domain, which means that voters can trust the information that appears on those websites. In 2024, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI recommended that all election offices adopt .gov to “help the public better recognize official government sites and emails while avoiding phishing attempts and websites that impersonate government officials.” However.gov can only inoculate the public against impersonation attacks once people know to look for it as an indicator of trustworthiness. That understanding can only happen once election offices adopt .gov on a widespread basis.

Most election websites use domains ending in .com.org, or .net, which anyone can purchase. Imagine that the hypothetical jurisdiction Verdant County uses the website “verdantvotes.com.” Any bad actor could register a seemingly legitimate web domain, for instance, “verdantelections.com”, and credibly pose as the local election office, populate the website with false information about results or the time, place, or manner of voting, or even trick voters into submitting sensitive personal information. Until there is widespread adoption of .gov, all election offices are at risk of these kinds of impersonation attacks.

Voters place the most confidence in election administration close to home. A 2024 Bipartisan Policy Center analysis found that 74% of Americans were confident their votes would be counted accurately in their own community, compared with 64% at the national level. To earn and leverage that local trust, election offices must maintain a trustworthy web presence.

What’s Responsible for the Increase? Legislative Mandates, Grants, and Technical Assistance

We looked into the states that made the largest gains in the last two years and found a variety of approaches. We found that when a state pairs a .gov requirement with funding and technical assistance, coverage climbs quickly. But a mandate may not be necessary to move the needle, some jurisdictions have taken it upon themselves to move to .gov.

In Washington, six of the state’s 39 counties have moved to .gov since our last analysis, including Spokane County, Washington’s second-largest. SB 5014 (2025), signed in April 2025, created a statutory mandate requiring county auditors and elections directors to use .gov domains for election websites and email by June 1, 2027. But Spokane’s transition was driven by its own security planning rather than the mandate: The office began planning the transition years before SB 5014 was introduced and completed it in August 2025. “The move to the .gov domain is a component of a strong security plan,” said current Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton in an email to us. (Local election officials there are called county auditors.) “For external users, such as voters, it provides legitimacy that our site and our emails are trustworthy.” Thirteen of 39 county auditor offices remain on non-.gov domains and will need to comply before 2027; the full impact of SB 5014 should be visible in our 2028 analysis.

Rhode Island has steadily closed its gap without any statutory mandate, improving from 26% in 2020 to 92% this year. Last year, Secretary of State Gregg Amore (whose office provides funds for cities and towns to make the switch) said that he anticipated having all 39 cities and towns on .gov “without legislative mandate.” Only three towns have yet to make the switch. In Newport, one of the cities that recently completed the transition, election administrator Hugh Moren described both the payoff and the effort: “Adopting a .gov domain demonstrates a commitment to transparency, security, and public trust by ensuring Newport voters and residents can easily identify and access official government services. The migration was a huge lift for our IT department, but it was worth it for the added security protections that come with a .gov domain.”

Other states have paired legal mandates with technical support to help officials make the move. Utah’s SB 127 (2023) required all governmental entities to use an authorized domain.gov.edu, or .mil, by January 1, 2025, with the Utah Cyber Center providing assistance and .utah.gov subdomains. The result has been near-universal adoption: 28 of Utah’s 29 counties now use .gov for their election websites. Utah’s most populous county, Salt Lake, adopted .gov between 2024 and 2026.

There Is Still Work To Do

Even though CISA provides .gov domains to governmental entities for free jurisdictions may not have the IT support required to make the transition. Even jurisdictions with sufficient IT staff may face difficulty in rebranding all their public-facing materials to align with an updated web domain.

But state legislatures can require their offices to move and provide the resources that offices need to make the move painless. Washington, Rhode Island, and Utah demonstrate the impact that state-level action, and local initiative, can have.

It is encouraging that election websites continue to move to .gov, but there remains substantial room for improvement. 56% of unique local election websites still do not use the .gov domain. Widespread adoption is the only way to give voters a reliable signal of trustworthiness, and every office that remains on .com.org, or .net remains a potential target for impersonation.

Methods

The code for our analysis is available on GitHub. Our methodology is broadly consistent with our 2024 analysis and the Center for Democracy & Technology’s 2022 analysis.

We analyzed the set of local election offices identified in 2022 by the Center for Tech and Civic Life as “primary election offices”, those primarily responsible for election administration in their jurisdiction. CTCL established this designation for their 2022 dataset.

For each office, we used a program to visit its website and follow any redirects to the final destination, then classified that destination by its top-level domain (e.g..gov.com.org). Rather than rely on a single address, we checked several for each office: the destination we reached in our 2024 analysis, the office’s current address as listed in the most recent CTCL dataset (published in March 2026), and its originally listed address. We followed the redirects from each, and, where a listed page did not load, checked the base web domain, and counted an office as using .gov if any of them ultimately resolved to a .gov domain. Checking multiple addresses correctly credits offices that completed a .gov migration and then retired the redirect from their old address, and it captures offices whose listed address changed since 2024. Where an office’s site resolved to .gov in a prior cycle, we continued to count it as .gov unless we directly observed that it had moved to a non-.gov domain.

Our method can undercount adoption in at least two scenarios. If an office has moved to .gov but none of the addresses we have on file point to the new site and its old address no longer redirects there, we will land on the old page and miss the migration. We also cannot count offices whose listed addresses are all unreachable.

This year’s method does, however, catch migrations that the more conservative methods in 2022 and 2024 missed: offices that switched to .gov but whose old address doesn’t point there. The steep rise seen in the figure between 2024-2026 therefore reflects both actual .gov adoption and improved detection on our part. The estimates in all three years should be considered lower bounds, with the true share of offices on .gov likely somewhat higher; because this year’s method is the one most likely to catch a .gov migration, the 2022 and 2024 estimates are probably off by more than the 2026 estimate.

For the states we discuss individually, Washington, Rhode Island, and Utah, we verified non-.gov jurisdictions by hand, so the figures we cite for those states reflect that closer review and may differ from a web crawl-only count.

Where multiple offices in the same jurisdiction shared a final domain, we counted that website once, attributing it to the primary election office.

To identify county-equivalent jurisdictions, we matched jurisdiction names against the Census Bureau’s 2023 County Adjacency File, which enumerates all counties and county equivalents across the 50 states and D.C. (excluding Puerto Rico). This produced a subset of 3,006 unique websites in 2026.

We drew our 2022 figures from prior analysis by the Center for Democracy & Technology; our 2024 figures are from our July 2024 analysis.

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