Case Study: Overseas Vote Foundation achieves scalable, reliable global voter services during peak elections with Amazon SES

Overseas Vote Foundation - Customer Case Study

Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF), a U.S. nonprofit that helps Americans register and request absentee ballots from abroad, needed to expand services to stateside voters (50 state-specific forms), add mobile apps, and handle big, predictable traffic spikes around elections while reducing costs and gaining flexibility. To solve these challenges the organization migrated to Amazon Web Services and adopted services including Amazon SES for email alongside EC2, RDS, and Elastic Load Balancing to achieve the scalability and reliability it lacked.

With help from Bear Code, OVF moved its production and staging environments to the AWS cloud—using Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS across Availability Zones, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon SES—so servers could scale up and down, mirror staging to production, and provide automatic failover. The migration delivered measurable gains: more than 1 million visits across 18 full-service sites in 2012 without incident, peak-period site visits up 20% (vs. 2008) and page views up 50%, plus a 200% user-visit increase vs. 2010; improved performance, lower risk of downtime, better cost control, and faster deployment of mobile services thanks to Amazon SES and the broader AWS platform.

Overseas Vote Foundation

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat

President and CEO