Democratic National Convention Voting App Log in

Background

Since 2008 IK has been building software for The US presidential elections and for customers like the United States Library of Congress. In 2012 we delivered a cutting edge solution for capturing ballot voting results on tablets to the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) during the DNCC national convention. That reporting solution was one of many other app experiences we’ve created in the election and campaign space of civic technology.

DNC Admin console – test data

Technology at the Democratic National Convention

Now, in 2016, we’re updating the DNCC app with a variety of new features including enabling real-time viewing of delegate voting by state on the convention floor. The data from the voting is fed to systems that report in to giant screens, updating the status of each state’s votes in real time for everyone at the convention (and the world for that matter because it’s covered by broadcast TV worldwide) to see. We take pride in our user interaction design; the delegates love the voting applications because the user experience is intuitive.

Test data – The CA vote from the DNC admin console

CNN’s on air Broadcast Software: The Magic Wall

Throughout the year long process of selecting the next President of the United States, you have seen CNN broadcast journalists John King, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper analyze live results on the CNN Magic Wall we fir built a few years back. Since that we’ve continued to add a ton of functionality including the new features you are seeing right now that visualize tracking the delegates during the presidential primaries.

John King of CNN using the “Magic Wall” that IK built for him

John King of CNN using the “Magic Wall” that IK built for him

Technology built for the Iowa Caucus

The Software we have built specifically for the conventions comes right on the heels of our successful projects for the Iowa Caucuses. Not wanting a repeat of the disastrous reporting and mistakes in 2012, both the Republican and Democratic parties of Iowa turned to InterKnowlogy for the first digital voting experience in Iowa Caucus history. InterKnowlogy played the lead role in transforming how caucuses and primaries can be run more efficiently, securely and reliably. There were countless hours of meetings with both political parties, UX design work to define the system, user interaction design to ensure ease of use, and a huge design and development effort to create more than a dozen mobile apps, IVR integration (for backup and for those that didn’t have access to computers or smartphones), back office workflow apps, and web applications for the public. On February 1, 2016, the night of the Caucuses, we were ready for an all-nighter to watch our work in action. But using our technology solution, both parties were able to securely and accurately report results in just 3 hours!

The Applications IK built for the 2016 Iowa Caucus

NDA until November (C3)

In November during the elections, you are going to see an application we are building that is “God’s gift to big data and data visualization”.  It’s NDA and embargoed until then so I can’t go into details.  But, it’s built on:  UWP, AzureSQL, AzureAD, Azure Blobs, Azure Tables, multiple queues and worker roles. We actually do dynamic SQL table generation in this platform to support PowerBI consumption of the data.

Of interest

We have prototyped the CNN Magic Wall, Hololens Version, and CNN’s initial reaction was positive.

Technology Stack

· CNN:

Magic Wall On-Air

WinRT, DirectX (3D and 2D), SQL, tons of http/JSON to CNN servers.

Magic Wall Online

Azure Web App: Angular (v1), TypeScript,, Web Sockets, Azure caching (Redis?), Azure SQL, Traffic Manager, Azure CDN …  

Azure Web API

Cloud service (fetch data from CNN servers and store in SQL)

Azure media services (upload, process, and serve videos)

· DNC Voting & reporting Applications:

WPF+SQL

· Iowa Caucus Applications:

• 12 Mobile apps
  • iOS, Android, Windows + Tablet (for each party)
  • Mobile voting apps to collect voting results from precincts
  • Xamarin
  • stores results in the cloud
• 2 UWP validation apps
  • apps for party officials to validate results
• 4 ASP .NET + angular= typescript websites for public and media results reporting
• 2 twilio IVRs (for each party)
• Plus services and databases in Microsoft Azure

The Future

Our work in civic technology won’t be done with the election in November. As the leading expert in civic technology, InterKnowlogy is working on many more projects that will continue to transform election technology.