Case Study: Overseas Vote Foundation achieves scalable, reliable, cost‑effective global voter services with Amazon Web Services

Overseas Vote Foundation - Customer Case Study

Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF) is a US-based nonprofit that helps Americans abroad register and request absentee ballots via the country’s first comprehensive online voter services. As OVF expanded to serve stateside voters through US Vote Foundation, it faced the complexity of supporting 50 state-specific voter-registration and absentee-ballot forms, needed mobile access, and required greater scalability, flexibility and cost control to handle large, cyclical traffic spikes around the 2012 election.

OVF migrated to Amazon Web Services with help from Bear Code, using Amazon EC2, RDS (multi‑AZ), Elastic Load Balancing and SES, and built a mirrored staging environment for reliable testing. The move delivered rapid scalability, better performance and lower operating costs, supported more than 1 million visits across 18 sites in 2012, enabled mobile services and improved reliability (including automatic failover), giving the team confidence through peak election demand.

Overseas Vote Foundation

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat

President and CEO