Case Study: The League of Women Voters achieves reliable, cost-effective scaling to handle 500,000 election-day visitors with Amazon Web Services

The League of Women Voters - Customer Case Study

The League of Women Voters (LWV), a nonpartisan organization that runs VOTE411.org to provide election information, needed a cost-effective, reliable hosting solution to handle huge, short-lived traffic spikes around federal elections. With about 30 staff and 750 volunteer affiliates, LWV needed a platform that could scale to serve as many as half a million unique visitors on Election Day and then scale down afterward without the high up-front infrastructure costs of previous approaches.

LWV moved VOTE411.org to AWS, deploying Drupal on Elastic Beanstalk with EC2 instances, Amazon S3 for voter guides, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and CloudWatch monitoring. The site scaled from 3 instances in August to 60 on Election Day, handling up to 500,000 visitors (50,000 daily in the months prior) while keeping pages fast (the heaviest page loaded in under 400 ms). AWS also sped development and testing through on-demand instances and simplified load testing, delivering significant cost savings and reliable performance.

The League of Women Voters

Jeanette Senecal

Senior Director