VoteAmerica

VoteAmerica was conceived by a small cadre of elections and technology experts ahead of the 2020 US elections, with a simple yet ambitious goal: preserve a healthy democracy by mobilizing record-breaking voter turnout.

Simplifying political engagement

In the words of Debra Cleaver, CEO for the 501(c)(3) organization, “It is harder to cast a ballot in the United States than in any other country with democratically elected leadership, and that is by design.” This, according to Cleaver, leaves millions of Americans unable to cast a ballot.

Cleaver points out that a survey conducted in October 2016 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni revealed 37% of Americans surveyed did not know when Election Day was and 41% of Americans did not vote. There is, however, a silver lining: if citizens are not voting because they do not know when or how to do so, then VoteAmerica can, as the reasoning goes, increase turnout by filling the information gap.

To that end, VoteAmerica builds publicly available tools and resources to empower those Americans to participate in elections. The group also runs large-scale voter registration and voter contact campaigns, with multi-channel informational messages.

Educating voters — online and offline

Cleaver likes to say that VoteAmerica is “goal-oriented and tactic-agnostic,” which means the organization has used a variety of tactics to reach voters since its founding in December 2019. In 2020, VoteAmerica reached over 25 million voters across its voter contact programs. This included sending over 100 million peer-to-peer SMS (text) messages containing non-partisan information, including when and where the recipient could exercise their right to vote and the documents they would need to bring with them to the polls in order to do so.

VoteAmerica has also worked to mobilize college students through campus media, such as by placing ads in student newspapers and posters across campus — reaching more than 3 million students in 2020 and 1.3 million students in 2022. The organization has purchased billboards and transit ads, targeting areas with historically low voter turnout — resulting in an estimated 119 million impressions in Wisconsin and 23 million impressions in Ohio in 2022.

Although its outreach channels have evolved over time, technology remains a constant focus at VoteAmerica. “We build easy-to-use software that helps people navigate needlessly complicated voting processes, and we give this software away to any mission-aligned organization that wants to increase turnout,” says Emily Behlmann, senior software engineer at VoteAmerica.

VoteAmerica’s tools help voters with all the actions that may be required to vote, from registering to requesting an absentee ballot to finding a polling place. The organization recently added a tool to help future voters — Americans under age 18 — to pre-register to vote as soon as their state allows it. Since the group’s founding, VoteAmerica’s tools have been used more than 5 million times, and the organization set a 2024 goal of 5 million additional uses.

Preparing for traffic surges and bad actors

VoteAmerica’s tech team knew from the start that this kind of scalability would require some support. Understanding the necessity of securing voter registration information and staying online during traffic surges, and having worked with Cloudflare in the past, former Director of Technology Nick Catalano turned to Project Galileo for help in 2020.

VoteAmerica faced two key challenges prior to joining Project Galileo. Per Catalano:

• “We needed a CDN of some sort to cache our assets and accelerate our APIs. By nature, election tools have ‘bursty’ traffic, with some days experiencing significantly more traffic than others. We were also churning a lot of data through our public APIs and tools, and we needed a way to handle the load.”
• “Everything we did needed to be secured from cyber attacks and malicious actors. Our systems store considerable amounts of personally identifiable information (PII), and security is a top concern of ours. We were particularly worried about DDoS attacks and attempts to compromise voters’ personal data.”

Catalano felt Project Galileo could provide VoteAmerica with the best combination of protection and performance to address these concerns; he said at the time, “We needed a solution that would let us distribute election information at a scale that grew in unpredictable ways. Cloudflare's infrastructure would enable us to handle varying levels of traffic without downtime or significant additional costs.”

Upon joining Project Galileo, VoteAmerica deployed the Cloudflare CDN and WAF, custom cache rules, Rate Limiting, and Cloudflare Workers. Key results include:

• Over 2.9 million voters relied on VoteAmerica’s voting registration, absentee ballot, polling place lookup, and voter registration verification tools served by the Cloudflare CDN in 2020 with zero downtime.
• Access to VoteAmerica’s voting information endpoint went from taking 1.5 seconds to only 20 milliseconds once Cloudflare caching went into effect.
• The Cloudflare WAF and Rate Limiting safeguarded login portals to core administrative interfaces and protected VoteAmerica’s back-end, which houses databases that contain PII and local election data, against content scraping.

Extending the reach of civic education

VoteAmerica has relied heavily on Cloudflare Rate Limiting, custom caching rules, and managed challenges to protect its online assets against malicious actors and optimize site uptime and reliability during 2020 and 2022 elections, and it will continue to do so as it prepares for the 2024 election cycle. The organization believes this is essential to maximizing voter turnout.

Behlmann notes, “We are very reliant on Cloudflare's caching infrastructure to speed up all parts of our website and APIs. We offer our tools as free embeddable widgets that third parties can use, and all of the JavaScript code was cached by Cloudflare.”

One of those third parties is a civic engagement platform that claims to have helped over 20 million voters with a number of tasks in 2020, such as checking their registration status, registering to vote, requesting an absentee ballot, and identifying their polling locations. In doing so, the platform made tens of thousands of calls to VoteAmerica’s public API for information about how to vote, all of which was stored on its back-end databases. Custom caching rules that the team wrote for the API both protected requests from overloading VoteAmerica’s servers and drastically improved performance: once implemented, access to the endpoint went from taking 1.5 seconds on average to just 20 milliseconds – in other words, almost no time at all.

Subduing a giant attack

Cloudflare Rate Limiting and managed challenges have proved equally consequential. In February 2024, a foreign actor attempted a DDoS attack against VoteAmerica’s website, slamming the voter registration tool with hundreds of thousands of submissions in quick succession. Cloudflare Rate Limiting, however, was quick to discern and absorb the traffic influx, keeping the site up and running with minimal delays. And challenges allowed legitimate users to continue to access the tools while shutting down scripted traffic.

“It is already so hard to vote in America, and voters are constantly being hit with misinformation and disinformation,” Behlmann says. “If our tools are not working properly, that only serves to degrade voters’ faith in the integrity of elections. That means our tools need to work reliably and quickly — all the time, no matter the load they are under.” Hence, the significance of security and performance solutions that provide an efficacious defense against malicious behavior and abnormal network activity.

Equipped with such tools through Project Galileo, VoteAmerica is helping to deliver stable and secure elections in the US at a time when doing so increasingly depends on a stable, secure Internet.