When a county in Texas needed to comply with new election legislation, they faced a fundamental challenge: how to provide citizens with easy access to real-time video of ballot handling while also storing nearly two years of recorded video — all without breaking the budget?
Milestone System's commitment to Responsible Technology made XProtect VMS on AWS the ideal solution for the county's election transparency challenge. Systems integrator Sology Solutions provided an approach that ensured secure and cost-effective, real-time video access to ballot handling, fostering public trust in the electoral process.
Sology designed and installed a video surveillance system built to comply with legal requirements for live streaming and long-term storage of election processes. The county's initial approach — where constituents had to submit formal requests to view video in person — created barriers rather than transparency and proved cost-prohibitive. Ultimately, the county partnered with Sology to deploy a cloud-based video system that would make the election process visible to all citizens while cutting costs substantially.
cloud infrastructure,
YouTube online information
A county in Texas needed to provide a way for citizens to easily see their election process in real-time. At first, county officials resisted cloud adoption: the team cited bandwidth concerns and questioned the reliability of what they viewed as an unproven approach. With the 2024 presidential election approaching, Sology Solutions had only a few days between receiving the purchase order and the required implementation date, to win over skeptics, design the system, and make it operational before voting began.
To help the county comply with the new streaming and video storage requirements, Sology Solutions built a system using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the infrastructure, with Milestone’s XProtect video management software (VMS) handling the video operations. The team installed numerous IP cameras from Axis Communications, with half of the devices streaming video of ballot-handling areas directly to the county's YouTube channel. For the long-term data archiving, the solution leverages AWS’s S3 cost-effective storage for the required 22-month retention period, while SD cards in the cameras provide backup during network disruptions.
The project timeline particularly impressed county officials. Traditional video security installations can take weeks to complete, largely due to delays in hardware delivery and setup. The cloud-based approach eliminated such delays, allowing Sology to deliver a complete solution in just over a single weekend.
Citizens gained access to their election process through familiar platforms like YouTube, while the county saved significantly on technology costs. The cloud-based system also delivered peace of mind through AWS's resilient and reliable infrastructure. An additional benefit is that election officials can now activate the entire system in seconds when new voting cycles begin.
For citizens, the difference was immediate. Instead of filing formal requests and visiting county offices, anyone could now watch ballot handling in real-time on YouTube. This level of transparency helped build confidence in the election process without requiring effort from either the public or county staff.
Behind the scenes, Sology installed multiple AXIS cameras with direct streaming capability to YouTube without requiring additional hardware. With no on-premise servers to maintain, the IT team could focus on other priorities while the cloud system ran reliably in the background. Video automatically moved to cost-effective long-term storage, eliminating manual archiving tasks.
The project has shifted opinions within the traditionally cloud-resistant county government. Seeing the practical benefits of cloud technology in a sensitive application (elections), has made officials more receptive to similar approaches in other departments.
The collaboration between Sology Solutions, Milestone Systems, and AWS demonstrated that even organizations with tight budgets and strict security needs can leverage cloud technology to deliver faster, more reliable public services.