As millions of voters will be reminded on Tuesday, U.S. elections are run largely on old technology from before the internet age that is vulnerable to hacking. Sensing an opportunity, Amazon this year has ramped up efforts to sell cities and political organizations on election-related software and services, in areas like cybersecurity and voter registration.
Amazon’s AWS cloud unit even created a website called “Election-as-a-Service” to tout its various election-related products, which also include software tools to help election administrators protect websites from denial of service attacks and secure sensitive data. Amazon’s hope is that if it can demonstrate it can improve security around elections, it can win more business from government agencies generally, say people who do business with the cloud unit.
