BUSINESS NEWS OCTOBER 15, 2019 / 6:06 AM / UPDATED 5 HOURS AGO

How Amazon.com moved into the business of U.S. elections

Nandita Bose
12 MIN READ

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) cloud computing arm is making an aggressive push into one of the most sensitive technology sectors: U.S. elections.

The expansion by Amazon Web Services into state and local elections has quietly gathered pace since the 2016 U.S. presidential vote. More than 40 states now use one or more of Amazon’s election offerings, according to a presentation given by an Amazon executive this year and seen by Reuters.

So do America’s two main political parties, the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the U.S. federal body charged with administering and enforcing federal campaign finance laws.

While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS - along with a broad network of partners - now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results, according to company documents and interviews.



In the fullest public picture yet of Amazon’s strategic move into U.S. election infrastructure, Reuters reviewed previously unreported company presentations and documents, and conducted more than two dozen interviews with lawmakers, election administrators, and heads of election security and technology in nearly a dozen states and counties that use Amazon’s cloud.

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