Election Night at Neapolitan Labs

In February 2019, we collaborated with the Auditor’s Office in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, to launch our first elections-centric website. The site met a need for the County, and we quickly found ourselves forming relationships with Auditors across the state who were looking for a solution to share election results and elected official information to their constituents. In the past 18 months, we’ve built 15 election websites and now work with one in six of the state’s county auditors.

The 2020 General Election was our most important night since launching the election sites, as we were expecting record website traffic, in line with the record voter turnout. We found ways to streamline our code, integrated a new content delivery network, and significantly expanded our server capabilities. We also took an all-hands-on-deck approach for our team members, with everyone from our President to Engineer to Project Manager to Bookkeeper online to monitor the sites and support our clients.

Results started rolling in just after 9:00 p.m. when counties posted their absentee ballot totals. Within 90 minutes, many of our clients had counted all of their election day votes and posted results directly to their websites. Our platform Mint Chip Lab makes it easy for County Auditors and their teams to upload results as both PDFs and in visual highlighted races. Other clients utilized our Alerts module to post prominent links to the Secretary of State’s website for live results, posting the detailed PDFs and featured races once all votes were counted. Regardless of approach, our sites are entirely optimized for mobile devices, and more than 70% of Election Night traffic was from smartphones.

While our team was proud to build and support these websites to serve election results to thousands of Iowans, the smooth election day wouldn’t have been possible without the dedicated staff at Iowa’s 99 County Auditor’s Offices. Another big shout-out goes to poll workers across the states, who ensured precincts throughout urban and rural Iowa ran smoothly and every voter had the opportunity to cast a ballot.

In Des Moines, we provisioned a display to show active traffic counts among our election websites.