Built to stay online when the whole country is watching.

Why shared and self hosting collapses under pressure

• Single servers have a hard limit. Most sites are sized for everyday, quiet traffic. On limited servers, there is zero headroom. When the entire county shows up to check results at the exact same moment, the system instantly freezes.
• One bad day causes a statewide domino effect. When multiple counties or agencies rely on the same hosting provider or shared framework, you aren't isolated. One surge in a neighboring district can drag down dozens of county websites simultaneously.
• Brittle setups lock your team down. When a site is patched together with fragile DIY configurations, making last-minute updates is too risky. If your communications team has to wait on an IT ticket just to fix a polling address, voters end up acting on outdated information.

Real-time updates, even under massive traffic spikes

• Horizontal scaling, automatically. Pantheon scales application servers out—not just up—so a sudden surge in voters checking polling locations or refreshing for results doesn't overwhelm a single point of failure.
• A Global CDN built for your CMS, not bolted on. Pantheon's CDN is purpose-built for Drupal, WordPress, and Next.JS caching rules, so pages load fast for users everywhere, without the manual configuration a generic CDN requires.
• Fresh content reaches voters instantly. When your team publishes a live results update, the change goes live globally in milliseconds. Because Pantheon’s network updates instantly at the edge, voters never get stuck looking at outdated information during critical moments.
• High cache-hit ratios under real load. During key events on Pantheon's platform, sites have maintained consistently fast response times and high cache-hit rates at the edge even as traffic surged—meaning performance doesn't degrade when demand is highest.
• Multi-zone failover and 99.99% uptime. Built-in redundancy means a single infrastructure issue doesn't become a statewide outage story.

Web autonomy your communications team will thank you for

Election communications can't wait on an IT ticket. With Drupal, WordPress, or Next.JS on Pantheon, non-technical staff can update polling locations, post emergency notices, and manage outreach content directly—without pulling an IT team member off mission-critical work to fix a typo.