Drupal Powered Elections in Jordan

On Tuesday the 10th of November, Jordanians flocked to cast their votes for their representatives in the Jordanian Lower House of Parliament for the next 4 years. 

The first vote was cast at 7:00 am with approx. 28,000 votes in the following 30 minutes.

The Independent Election Commission (IEC), which supervises the election to ensure the integrity of the democratic process, had an additional mandate: Safeguarding the voters during an election season hindered by restrictions due to COVID-19.

Drupal was identified by the IEC as the ideal technology that aligned with their needs to ensure that their teams are supported in achieving their objectives.

Drupal succeeds in delivering key objectives:

1. Accessibility To Information Leading To Orderly Voting

As in previous elections, voters had designated vote-casting locations. However, the lack of accessibility to information regarding these locations that caused frustration amongst voters was avoided this time.

The new IEC Drupal 8 website provided voters with access to this information via a mobile-friendly, simple but powerful search engine.

Voters were able to easily identify their designated ballot-casting locations by simply entering their national ID numbers. The search engine would provide voters with their designated polling station from a database that featured a total of 1,824 stations.

This feature proved to be critical for enhancing clarity, transparency, and access to information vital to the voting experience.

At one point during election day, 10,510 active users were on the site using the national ID search engine tool to identify their polling station.

The design of the IEC website also helped with accessibility. 

The UI/UX design featured intelligent user journey mapping which optimized the user experience for all website visitors based on their behavior, expectations, and needs.

2. Timely Services and Performance

A total of 403,456 users visited the website during election day and the 48 hours that preceded with a total of 581,963 sessions taking place. Sessions on election day alone amounted to 417,708.

Despite the heavy load, the number of requests, and traffic on election day; the website users didn’t experience any frustrating page loading issues as the average page loading time on mobile was almost 4 seconds and the average server response time was approx. 1 second.

_{Despite a surge in traffic load, the IEC website didn't suffer from the typical performance and page loading issues.}

Traffic was expected to be high and intense during election season. More importantly, the requests and concerns of the website visitors (such as submitting complaints, or requesting information critical to their voting) were time-sensitive, and as such the IEC website couldn’t afford to have any downtime or maintenance issues.

Thanks to Drupal 8’s ability to ensure seamless performance regardless of the traffic load on the website in addition to the 24/7 support team behind the scenes, the IEC was able to successfully deliver all their digital services to the general public via the website with no technical issues arising.

Vardot's IEC project support team was also on standby to deal with any unlikely technical issues that may arise throughout the whole election week.

"Despite facing many technical challenges—due to the internal team's difficulty in acquiring materials—the Vardot team over-delivered. They're an extremely dedicated and results-driven team."

Digital Marketing Consultant @ Independent Elections Commission

3. Superior User Experience

The vast majority of the website visitors (>95%) relied upon their mobile devices to browse and navigate the IEC website.

During the peak traffic period, bounce rates were low (approx. 29%) which is a testament to the successful implementation of user journey mapping during the UI/UX design phase of the IEC website. 

The IEC opted to build their new Drupal site using Varbase CMS because they were impressed with the demonstrated success and simplicity of building enterprise-grade multilingual websites optimized for search engine performance across all languages.

This objective was successfully delivered as the main source of traffic proved to be from organic search results - 40% of traffic was through Google Organic Search.

Proving the superiority of Drupal websites when it comes to SEO performance and ranking higher on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo!