Rocking the Vote Overseas for the U.S. Military

The Department of Defense Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) helps U.S. citizens—including approximately 150,000 military members deployed to more than 150 countries worldwide—vote in federal elections back home through its website, FVAP.gov.

But with a growing user base, rising hosting costs, and the complex U.S. voting requirements, FVAP leadership called on Booz Allen to help optimize the website to scale rapidly for peak election traffic.

The 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act ensures that U.S. military service members, their families, and citizens around the world can vote absentee in federal elections. FVAP provides the resources these voters need to receive, cast, and return their ballots.

Balloting laws are different depending on an absentee voter’s state, and that means state-specific requirements were needed across the board on FVAP.gov. These features included automated online assistance and an enterprise database to standardize and manage data sources such as local election official data, voting assistance officer metrics, and guidelines for absentee voting.

In addition, since web traffic would surge during election times and then slow considerably, the hosting environment had to support peak traffic requirements year-round to sustain the application.

Automated scaling, pay-as-you-go pricing models, agile deployment timeframes, testing automation—these were some of the issues Booz Allen’s consultants tackled in a business case analysis weighing alternative hosting providers. They also took into account FVAP’s nonfinancial priorities, such as rapid resource scalability, an elastic pricing model based on usage, and improved support services.

Our developers designed an automated online assistant that helps absentee voters complete the Federal Post Card Application and/or the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot based on the laws of their resident states.

Authenticated FVAP staff can develop and publish web pages using the custom content management capability we developed. As part of the migration, we also designed the hosting and security architecture in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) GovCloud that increases performance and security.