Case Study: Democratic National Committee achieves 10x cost reduction and scalable Election Day hotline with Twilio

The Democratic National Committee Powers Elections With Twilio

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), which runs nationwide campaign and voter-protection efforts including the Organizing for America movement, operated a national Voter Protection Hotline (800-311-VOTE) to collect reports of polling-place problems. Their legacy telecom systems were expensive and prone to scaling failures—costing hundreds of thousands in 2008 and risking outages during peak election activity.

The DNC replaced legacy vendors with Twilio, enabling their web team to build an IVR in days and route callers to state representatives. On Election Day the hotline handled hundreds of calls per minute (with many calls 30+ minutes), scaled reliably, and cut costs roughly 10x; the DNC now contacts about 35,000 voters each month.

Democratic National Committee

Josh Hendler

Director of Technology