Ensuring National Voter Registration Integrity

Customer Profile

In addition to its rich history and renowned culture, this country takes great pride in its national parliamentary elections. With distinct rules governing registration and voting processes, the majority of this country’s adults go to the polls on election day, with victorious candidates hopefully enjoying clear-cut popular vote mandate wins as a result.

Under this system, the country’s Election Board is tasked with many important functions, including managing 150+ parliamentary voting contests on a single day. For millions of voters, the candidates running for office, and those invested in the success of their political parties, it’s critically important that “everything goes right” on Election Day. The Election Board knows that the future direction of country itself depends on their ability to execute a voting process free of any contested technical or organizational issues.

The Challenge

With the geographic expanse of the country, many residents live in rural areas or away from metropolitan centers, and there are associated challenges in the voter enrollment process. In assisting those efforts and easing the registration process for both remote residents and those citizens who have already embraced digital platforms, the Election Board’s information technology (IT) team rolled out a mobile application that could be used for “anywhere, anytime” voter enrollment, address change processing, or return-to-voter-roll applications.

In another digital initiative, the IT team deployed a Voter Information website allowing citizens to identify their polling stations based on their geographic location, as well as access details concerning polling hours, electorate profiles, and incumbent office-holders.

The IT team needed to assure both the government and voters that both the mobile registration application and voter information website processes hosted in their primary Data Center would offer optimal performance, regardless of increased usage. While the IT team had gradually expanded data center operations from one to two, they knew it was imperative to update the legacy technology currently deployed for network performance, applications monitoring, and visibility across their multi-site data center footprint.

Complicating matters was the timeline for these changes. While these technology upgrades were under consideration for some time, the government moved up the date for the federal election, meaning IT had less than 2 months to select vendor solutions, implement those technologies, and deploy in production in time to support voting day activities.

Solution in Action

With only a couple of months until election day, the IT team quickly enhanced their end-to-end network visibility and real-time monitoring of their application and website environments by deploying a virtual nGeniusONE Service Assurance analytics platform that leveraged smart data generated by InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) hardware appliances and software-based nGenius packet flow switches instrumented in their updated data center and network environment. With this solution monitoring network traffic traversing their data center and election office environments, the IT team leveraged real-time nGeniusONE Service Dashboard views dedicated to monitoring their voter registration mobile application performance, as well as that of their Voter Information website.

Beyond the time-sensitive monitoring solutions for voter registration activities, the IT team is using nGeniusONE for ongoing monitoring of 30-to-40 business-critical applications operating in electoral offices. Should an application issue surface, the IT team can drill down into contextual application service dependency views in nGeniusONE that show if the anomaly truly relates to the application or, instead, another service delivery dependency, which improves IT collaboration and reduces troubleshooting cycles.

The Results

The IT team’s ability to implement the next-generation network and application monitoring environment in the timeframe needed for real-time monitoring of critical voter registration and election information platforms helped the Election Board support increased turnout across more than 150 contests. As a result, collective government, political party, and public perception of the successful execution of this critical election was highly favorable, which helped validate the Election Board’s long-standing role in the country’s voting process and, by extension, their IT team.

The Election Board’s ongoing network, application, and service performance has been improved by deploying next-generation software-based ISNG and nGenius packet flow switch instrumentation at two data center locations to better manage the flow of traffic throughout the network. With nGeniusONE leveraging smart data generated in real time from network traffic, the IT team has refined their traffic forecasting, which enables them to better plan new application rollouts, manage existing network capacity to their offices, and analyze service performance to ensure bandwidth is available for optimum end-user experience.

Moving to NETSCOUT’s solution approach offered several strategic and tactical benefits to the Election Board:

• Rapid Deployment and Visibility – The software-based approach enabled the solution to be deployed in production with only a month’s notice in time to support election day activities.
• Cost-Effective and Within Budget – Government cost containment guidelines were met, while also allowing IT to instrument two data centers with NETSCOUT data sources versus a single site.
• Vendor-Agnostic Technology for Long–Term Investment Protection – nGeniusONE provides a network-aware, vendor-neutral APM approach that supports the Election Board’s existing IT investments without the need for modification of those systems.