Everbridge Powers Secure Remote Voting for Vermont State Legislature as Lawmakers Adhere To COVID-19 Social Distancing Guidelines
With dozens of successfully completed secure votes, powered by Everbridge, the Vermont model serves as best practice to protect state and federal legislators from coronavirus
BURLINGTON, Mass., April 27, 2020 — Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG), the global leader in critical event management (CEM), today announced that the Vermont State Legislature deployed its platform to facilitate remote voting by state lawmakers in order to keep legislators, reporters, and Statehouse staff safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote voting is a first in Vermont, where legislative business has always been conducted in person. Lawmakers approved the virtual voting measure to allow Senators and House members to pass legislation without packing into the Statehouse, where small committee rooms make it difficult to follow social distancing guidelines. The successful secure remote voting model serves as a best practice to protect other state and federal lawmakers from the pandemic.
More than a month after departing the Statehouse to avoid spreading the coronavirus, Vermont’s House of Representatives began remotely passing bills that are intended to address the pandemic. Meeting over video conference and using the Everbridge mobile app to cast their votes, the Vermont General Assembly – consisting of the 150-member House and 30-member Senate – last week approved a series of COVID-19 measures. In recent weeks, the House held several practice sessions and one-on-one trainings with members to get them comfortable with the new technology. On Thursday, lawmakers conducted over 20 separate secure votes – using the Everbridge platform – on bills, resolutions, and items related to bill advancement through committees.
“It’s a new frontier for all of us,” Senate President Pro Tempore Tim Ashe told reporters after the vote. “But one of the byproducts is that the use of technology is proving to open up the doors of state government — especially the legislative process — more than ever. We want to model what we’re expecting the people of Vermont to do to keep people safe.”
According to a March 30 post by Representative Kathleen James published in the Bennington Banner, Everbridge is “already used by our Capitol Police. It offers a secure way to vote, and to verify who’s voting. We’re also making sure every legislator is comfortable with the technology, so we can stay squarely focused on our highest priority: ensuring the health and safety of Vermonters.”
“The Vermont State Legislature demonstrates leadership by serving as a role model for adhering to social distancing best practices,” said Brian Toolan, Senior Director of Government Strategy at Everbridge. “We’re honored to have Everbridge power this important government use case without sacrificing security or compliance, or slowing down the legislative process. When it comes to protecting legislators and staff or providing critical communications for citizens, Everbridge, a FedRAMP-authorized company, makes for the perfect partner across state, local and the federal government.”
FedRAMP Authorization certifies that Everbridge has passed the rigorous security and risk management review process required to offer its Everbridge Suite solution to federal agencies, a mandate by OMB for any cloud service provider that serves the federal government.
While supporting remote voting represents a new and innovative use of Everbridge’s solutions in Vermont, the State has utilized the platform for more than three years. In addition to Vermont, Everbridge supports several statewide deployments such as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Florida, and California.
Everbridge launched a series of actions to address the coronavirus, including partnering with the U.S. Army to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 across over 400 military locations in 70 countries, and provides daily updates on its Coronavirus Preparedness Hub. In response to COVID-19, the Everbridge platform has delivered nearly 300 million communications specific to coronavirus as well as launched its COVID-19 Shield rapid deployment templates to protect people and maintain operations amid the pandemic. The Everbridge CEM platform reaches over 550 million people across the world while serving leading F500 companies as well as cities, states, and entire countries. Everbridge has been selected by eight countries, several states in India, and multiple states in the United States to protect populations.
About Everbridge
Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG) is a global software company that provides enterprise software applications that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical events in order to keep people safe and businesses running. During public safety threats such as active shooter situations, terrorist attacks or severe weather conditions, as well as critical business events including IT outages, cyber-attacks or other incidents such as product recalls or supply-chain interruptions, over 5,000 global customers rely on the company’s Critical Event Management Platform to quickly and reliably aggregate and assess threat data, locate people at risk and responders able to assist, automate the execution of pre-defined communications processes through the secure delivery to over 100 different communication devices, and track progress on executing response plans. The company’s platform sent over 3.5 billion messages in 2019 and offers the ability to reach over 550 million people in more than 200 countries and territories, including the entire mobile populations on a country-wide scale in Australia, Greece, Iceland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Sweden, and a number of the largest states in India. The company’s critical communications and enterprise safety applications include Mass Notification, Incident Management, Safety Connection™, IT Alerting, Visual Command Center®, Public Warning, Crisis Management, Community Engagement™ and Secure Messaging. Everbridge serves 8 of the 10 largest U.S. cities, 9 of the 10 largest U.S.-based investment banks, 47 of the 50 busiest North American airports, 9 of the 10 largest global consulting firms, 7 of the 10 largest global auto makers, all 4 of the largest global accounting firms, 9 of the 10 largest U.S.-based health care providers, and 6 of the 10 largest technology companies in the world. Everbridge is based in Boston and Los Angeles with additional offices in Lansing, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Bangalore, Kolkata, London, Munich, New York, Oslo, Singapore, Stockholm and Tilburg. For more information, visit www.everbridge.com, read the company blog, and follow on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
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