The Georgia Secretary of State’s office manages everything from corporate licensing to cemetery regulations. But its most visible responsibility is running elections across the state’s 159 counties.
A flawless Election Day performance, including secure check-in systems, short wait times for voters, and perfect ballot accuracy, is needed to maintain public trust in the democratic process. For Jonathan Reich, CIO of the Office of Georgia Secretary of State since 2024, that means ensuring technology systems stay running no matter what.
“We want to be known for our fair, safe, and accurate elections,” Reich said.
“We have sub-minute check-in times. For the Nov 2024 general election, when voters got to the poll and signed in, that took around 50 seconds on average. That’s because our electronic poll pads, which verify voter information, are constantly talking to our back-end environment.”
That back-end infrastructure is critical not only for supporting elections, but to ensure ready access to all of the agency’s citizen services. To streamline operations and address costs, the Secretary of State’s office has moved away from traditional three-tier IT systems, which required specialized administrators for storage, compute, and networking.
Today, the agency runs its environment on Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that lets Reich’s 26-person team manage all of the office’s workloads through a single interface.
“There’s a huge benefit to external customers in reliability and uptime,” Reich said. “We don’t tend to see hardware issues or challenges during maintenance. It just works.”
“My worries today are about ensuring we’re safe on the cyber side, and improving the user experience,” Reich added. “But I don’t worry about the infrastructure anymore.”
Managing Complexity
As a public sector CIO, Reich must do more than simply deliver reliable government services. His first responsibility, he noted, is to Georgia’s taxpayers.
“I don’t like spending any money I don’t have to,” Reich said. “I’m a Georgia taxpayer myself, I work really hard at maximizing the dollars that are entrusted to me, and Nutanix lets me use those dollars in a way that maximizes our operation.”
When the Secretary of State’s office began modernizing its IT infrastructure several years ago, officials faced challenges common to many government agencies. The office’s traditional three-tier environment, with separate systems for compute, storage, and networking, was not only aging, but needlessly complex.
“If you have separate infrastructure for each environment, you need a storage area network administrator, you need somebody for the virtualization,” Reich said.
“Being able to do compute, storage, and networking in one tool is huge. Not needing to have separate skillsets helps in both money and time.”
Eye on Reliability
For Reich, nothing is more important than ensuring his office’s infrastructure provides ready, reliable access to the services needed by citizens and state employees.
“Nobody wants to deal with an environment that needs constant care and feeding, or has issues staying online,” he said. “With all that is going on in Georgia, Nutanix helps take the stress off technology.”
Part of this dependability, Reich said, is owed to the simplicity of the infrastructure. But he also cited the importance of cybersecurity and disaster recovery capabilities. Relying on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor has helped.
“The native hypervisor being able to run virtual firewalls inside the environment, that’s important,” he said.
For disaster recovery, they have environment-aware backups in their DR sites.
“We have hot data copies of everything sitting in multiple data centers, and that workflow will run in either place,” Reich said. “That’s native to Nutanix, so we don’t really have to worry about separate DR design, and I don’t have to buy another set of licenses for disaster recovery.”
He said they focus on creating solid processes.
“We’re taking every opportunity to make sure that everyone who should be voting has the ability to do it,” Reich said. “The ballots are being properly tallied, and we were able to prove that without a shadow of a doubt. The technology helped us to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to validate the results.”
In December 2024, Georgia’s Savanna Morning News reported the first-of-its-kind audit that used Optical Character Recognition technology to read the text on all 5.3 million ballots cast in Georgia during the 2024 election, revealing just 87 discrepancies between the original count and the audit. All were due to human-error. Eighty-six of the errors were attributable to absentee voters who filled out paper ballots incorrectly, such as leaving a faint checkmark instead of bubbling their choice in. The other was traced back to a mistake made at the county level with a write-in vote. The audit then checked against the totals from the ballot scanning machines, which tabulated votes on Election Night via QR codes printed on ballots.
“The ballot image audit shows again that the votes in Georgia were counted accurately, securely, and quickly. Our system works accurately and can be trusted.” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in an announcement published on the government agency’s website.
Looking Ahead
Ultimately, Reich noted, the goal for his office’s IT investments is to improve the experience of Georgia citizens who interact with state government.
“We’re not a company that you choose to do business with,” he said. “You have to (work with us for state services). So, I think it is incumbent on us as an agency to make that experience better and easier."
Looking ahead, Reich sees opportunities to leverage new technologies to further streamline citizen services.
“Can we make it 20 percent easier to renew your license when you call in for help?” he said. “Can we make it just that much better or quicker when we respond?”
Those efforts, Reich said, may include new automations or cloud investments. But for now, he is confident that the state’s technology environment is delivering exceptional performance.
“I think we’re building an excellent product, and providing excellent customer-facing solutions, to ensure that what we do is always on and ready for our customers in the state of Georgia.”
Editor’s note: In a related story, read How Zero Trust Architecture Protects Government Data and Networks. Bill Wyatt, CIO and CISO at the State of Georgia, Office of the State Treasurer explains how strong security standards and a move toward password-less systems reduce risk.
Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Follow him @CalvinHennick.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this story. He is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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