The topic of election cybersecurity has gained renewed attention in recent years due to a deepening distrust in election integrity in North America. Despite significant investment and progress in securing election systems, vulnerabilities and hacking concerns continue to be a pressing issue. The author has been working with the Bugcrowd team to build bridges between security researchers and voting technology providers, aiming to expose critical vulnerabilities before threat actors can exploit them. A recent pilot event, the Election Security Research Forum (ESRF), marked a significant milestone in this effort, demonstrating the feasibility of collaboration between hackers and election technology providers under principles of Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD). The ESRF fostered increased trust and collaboration between these groups, laying the groundwork for future engagements and modernizing the certification process for election technology.