After the 2000 elections the news media election consortium decided to modernize their election computer system. After the 2002 election they dissolved Voter News Service (VNS). The modernization they wanted was not successful.
ThorTech Solutions was called in by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to perform a seemingly impossible task: Build an election system for the 2004 primaries and the general elections in less than 12 months. ThorTech Solutions previously had completed a project for EMR/MI on time and under budget for CNN.
Working closely with EMR/MI, the Associated Press and the other broadcast and cable members of NEP, ThorTech Solutions remained on schedule and on budget delivering a fully modernized system.
The Election Analysis System is a fully redundant distributed web application that performs real-time statistical analysis of the data. It provided live feeds to the broadcast networks and their political analysts.
Due to the wide visibility and sensitivity of this data, the system had demanding security and high availability requirements necessitating multiple hardware infrastructures in disparate geographical locations.
The ThorTech team used advanced techniques to provide a rich user interface with real-time data refresh and messaging via a browser.
By incorporating lightweight development and stringent testing processes ThorTech Solutions was able to implement, test and deliver sophisticated statistical models within a fraction of the time it otherwise would have taken. The Election Analysis System provided projections for races and exit poll analysis in real-time for the 2004 U.S. General Elections. It distributes the results to NEP and over 200 news organizations around the world.