The system proved resilient and no downtime was experienced. Conducting an online election is one of the most complex transactions that could take place on the Internet. While a voter may just point and click on a candidate or party for whom they're voting, underneath the screen are multiple levels of security, encryption and voter authentication, as well as a series of databases to synchronize. In March 2000, it ran the vote for the Arizona Democratic Primary, the first legally binding election on the Web. CEO Joe Mohen says the key factor in the decision to go with the Microsoft platform was, first of all, scalability.
Elections can be as little as a few hundred voters, to the many, many million.
We have to be able to handle online scalability requirements, because voter turnout is unpredictable, and furthermore voter traffic is very hard to gauge in a peak load like that. An equally important factor is reliability, says Mohen. You cannot say to an electorate, we're going to push back the elections from November 7th to November 14th because we have technical problems. Elections have to work, it's as simple as that. Avanade has defined a suite of offerings that share the common elements of speed, invention, and lowering the cost of computing.