Keeping Democracy Connected

Elections matter more than ever. In an era when accurate counts and rapid results are critical, how do you ensure that every vote counts? While urban areas are generally covered with reliable communications, almost every nation has significant areas where land-based communications can’t be relied upon due to distance, geography or other concerns, but where votes need to be counted. Modern election reporting via satellite can deliver trusted real-time results from even the most remote locations, increasing reporting integrity and public trust.By providing satellite communications, elections officers can ensure rapid and accurate reporting from even the most remote locations.

There are three basic levels of support that Pulsar provides to the agencies who run national elections.

1. Communications and Continuity: At the most basic level, satellite phones can provide secure voice communications to support communications between elections offices and polling locations to work through any operational issues.

2. Precinct Elections Reporting: At a more advanced level, agencies who use voice to report results can rely upon satellite phones for secure communications, with Pulsar delivering the highest levels of security.

3. Digital Election Results Transmission and Reporting: The gold standard of digital elections is using a modern election technology system. This software-based system can report results via multiple methods including secure satellite connections. Trusted reporting gives real-time results with no chance of physical interference as with paper ballots. Pulsar, together with our global elections partner teams, does this at the scale necessary for countries as large and diverse as Brazil and the Philippines. There are many advantages of a modern elections reporting system and all of them rely on secure delivery from polling places. When those places are in remote locations, elections agencies turn to Pulsar.

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Elections matter more than ever. In an era when accurate counts and rapid results are critical, how does Brazil count every vote? This is the story of how, with the help of Inmarsat satellite technology and our local partner SmartTrade, Pulsar kept democracy connected during the elections in Brazil.

Brazil is a country as large as whole continents, with over 200 million people living in an area twice the size of the European Union. Yet small villages are spread across huge areas accessible only by canoe or pack animal. As Latin America’s largest democracy, Brazil holds elections every 2 years and requires every citizen to cast a ballot.

Inmarsat featured Pulsar in their first-ever virtual Partner conference with a case study related to our work supporting the Brazilian elections. This was an extraordinary project using Inmarsat BGAN and the Pulsar network and Pulsar network management system to enable secure and rapid election results reporting during the 2020 elections. The conference featured a three minute video highlighting our work and then a Q&A session with Pulsar President Robert Sakker exploring some of the challenges and successes of the program.

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Pulsar has been a leader in supporting national elections results for over ten years worldwide, having been engaged in Brazil since 2012, the Philippines since 2016 and most recently in Honduras with the country’s first digital election in 2021. We provide local on-site support before, during and after elections, with dedicated and on-call technical support at the network level worldwide.

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Reliability and security are key requirements for successful elections. Delivering both require long-standing relationships with satellite partners to deliver thousands of connections in small areas, and a dedicated terrestrial network for reliable and secure data delivery. That’s where the Pulsar network comes in. Pulsar has points of presence (POPs) in strategic locations around the world to interconnect with our satellite partners such as Inmarsat, and deliver data via a dedicated APN with a VPN for ultimate security and reliability. Pulsar provides election officials real-time data monitoring through our Pulsar device management platform. This ensures that election results can be trusted for accurate delivery. The network is configurable to meet local needs from election to election, and our relationships with elections reporting partners mean you can rely upon tried and true end-to-end results delivery systems.

More broadly, Pulsar’s operations span all mission critical applications be they on land (fixed and land mobile services), on water (maritime services), or in the air (aero services). These services have been used in practically every application to provide narrowband and broadband communications for disaster recovery operations, temporary construction trailers, remote voice/video/data services, SCADA/metering and other mission critical applications. We enable legacy and next generation networks to interwork and to operate over all MSS and FSS services.  With our network architecture, we are able to provide the most secure and cost-effective means of voice, data and messaging communications while achieving the highest possible speeds and availability depending on the client application.  Our globally redundant network architecture allows for seamless integration of next-generation technology into existing infrastructures.  

Pulsar is its own ISP, operating our own global data network, and we are not dependent on others for the acquisition or routing of IP addresses (ARIN, RIPE and APNIC IP address ranges are available).  Pulsar can satisfy its customers’ connectivity and hosting needs, whilst guaranteeing the lowest possible latency in a satellite environment, even when combining access methods from different satellite operators with private leased lines. Pulsar currently serves commercial customers worldwide and partners in various segments of the government (i.e. DoD, Civil, Public Safety, Utilities, etc.), Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), and multiple commercial markets.

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“We were able to meet the requirement of securely delivering accurate election results in a timely manner from remote areas. The technical solution and excellent support we received from the team was critical in the success of this program.”
~ Brazil Office of Elections

“Pulsar is without a doubt “the” election specialist for countries dealing with connectivity challenges in remote areas.”
~ Ross Newcombe, Inmarsat