The Election Services Co. has, during it’s 31 years of service, always provided secure and accurate election practices no matter what the obstacles before us have been. We’ve weathered the likes of the great Northeast blackout, the wrath of Super Storm Sandy, the Anthrax scare of the postal service and many other such instances.
Most of these obstacles could have affected the physical processes to deliver our services. However, we never experienced more than a few minutes of outage due to our preparedness.
But this situation, covid-19, is different and unprecedented. This one can affect the people who actually provide our service. Mainly the operations personnel that process the lettershop paper ballots, and ultimately our largest partner, the US postal personnel that deliver and retrieve the ballots.
Our administrative and IT personnel have confined themselves as the they mostly work from home. This has been a practice we are accustomed to, as we’ve demonstrated this ability over the many years.
Our election servers are housed in an unmanned hardened data center ensuring electronic votes are processed 24/7 without interruption.
Both our main office and recovery site are capable of handling paper balloting with remote optical scanning capabilities over a secure network. Over the years we have established trained “standby” personnel to open and load the ballots to our optical equipment in the event we need to do so.
Our lettershop partners have also adopted a “standby” protocol that can employ backup personnel in the event anyone cannot report to work. AS ESC produces approximately 7 million paper ballots while servicing over 14 million members annually, this is in effect for a 24/7 operation.
Our offices, equipment, cubicles, rugs etc., are sanitized frequently by a professional company. Further, we are practicing preventive measures as per Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations.
Be assured , barring any unexpected local or state mandates, for the protection of our partners, our employees, our service providers, and our clients, we are doing everything humanly possible to insure the service we have been known for the past many years will continue uninterrupted.
If you have any questions/concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.
Wishing you all well – stay safe!
Frank Fatone
President
Election Services Co.
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