Secure elections, Chicago style

Challenge

The Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago ("Board") planned to debut a brand new voting system at over 2,000 precincts across 230 miles for their upcoming presidential primary election, scheduled for March 17, 2020.  Providing secure electronic elections demanded that the Board:

• Protect the integrity of voter choices on a digital ballot
• Guard against hacks and cyberattacks when those choices were electronically transmitted across the network
• Ensure that every vote was accurately counted and accounted for

Then, six days before the election, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Suddenly, the bar for achieving secure electronic elections across multiple voting sites became that much higher.

Solution

The Board migrated to an all-Verizon redundant circuit model designed to segment traffic into three distinct data groups: touchscreens and scanners, electronic poll books, and employee communication. Verizon’s end-to-end private network solution included:

• 2,200 activations of 4G LTE modems
• 1 private wireless gateway
• 2 geo-diverse 1-Gig burstable IP circuits
• 1 dedicated VPN circuit
• Partner-based secured routers & firewalls
• Professional and Managed Network Services

Outcome

With a private and robust election network infrastructure and personnel support, the Board was able to quickly, efficiently, and securely complete their elections according to plan.

• Scanned ballots and results took only 5-10 minutes to transmit after polls closed.
• By 11:00 pm on election night, already 90% of polling places had reported results. 
• Voter turnout in Chicago was 9 percentage points above the state average.*