The following press release just arrived via email:
After overseeing the June Primary election this past Tuesday evening, Secretary of State Jason Gant made the following statement regarding the operation of election systems across South Dakota:
“For this election, we made significant improvements to the election night reporting system, including the movement to a cloud based system. During previous elections, the system would crash if there were over 200 simultaneous users. With the improvements to the system, our servers maintained stability at well over 600 users, with capabilities of handling thousands of simultaneous website users at the same time County Auditors continued to upload results.”
“In addition to improving system stability by moving results to the cloud, major advancements to the system included a better user interface, as well as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to enable people to stream election results to computers and mobile devices.”
“Our election night reporting system was hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud system through a local vendor, BPro of Pierre, who programmed the election night reporting system and helped us design its appearance and new features.”
“In terms of the computing power utilized, instead of having three servers running year-round to host our election night reporting, our cloud based system ran on 2 virtual server “cores” – an equivalent of a server – until an hour before the polls closed. At that time, we ramped it up to 200 cores at a cost of pennies per core, per hour. Within 2 hours after results were in, we stepped it back down to 2 core instances.”
“As opposed to purchasing and maintaining expensive equipment used once or twice a year, the cloud based solution allowed us to purchase what we needed for only the duration of the time it was needed.
“I’m very pleased with the system performance in terms of user capacity, speed and performance. I am very confident that taxpayers and those monitoring election results will appreciate the advancements we continue to bring to the election night reporting system.”