H o w o th e A m a z o n .c o m m o v ed i nt b u si n e s o f U S e l e c t io ns

that in over 40 states, the Amazon cloud is being trusted to power in some way, some aspect of elections,” Michael Jackson, leader, Public Health & US Elections at AWS, told prospective government clients in February via a presentation on a webinar.

The company’s efforts are welcomed by election administrators, who in interviews said they often struggle with keeping outdated systems up to date at the local level.

In Oregon, for example, the state’s inhouse servers that support election services shut down every time there is a power outage — an often occurrence as Oregon updates its electric grid, according to Peter Threlkel, chief information officer at the Oregon Secretary of State.

A move to the cloud fixes that problem, and Oregon ran a pilot with AWS to move its voter registration system to the cloud, he said.

Some security experts like David O’berry, co-founder, Precog Security, said moving to AWS is “a good option for campaigns, who do not have the resources to protect themselves.”

Still, Amazon’s growing presence in the elections business could undermine what many officials view as a strength of the US voting system: decentralisation.

Most security experts said that while Amazon’s cloud is likely much harder to hack than systems it is replacing, putting data from many jurisdictions on a single system raises the prospect that a single major breach could prove damaging.

“It makes Amazon a bigger target” for hackers, “and also increases the challenge of dealing with an insider attack,” said Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at cybersecurity startup Upguard.

A recent hack into Capital One Financial Corp’s data stored on Amazon’s cloud service was perpetrated by a former Amazon employee. The breach affected more than 100 million customers, underscoring how rogue employees or untrained workers can create security risks even if the underlying systems are secure.

Amazon says its systems are reliable. “Over time, states, counties, cities, and countries will leverage AWS services to ensure modernisation of their elections for increased security, reliability, and analytics for an efficient and more effective use of taxpayer dollars,” an AWS spokesperson said.

Amazon’s push into the election business comes as the company faces criticism from politicians, labour unions and privacy advocates over its business practices and growing influence. President Donald Trump has accused the company of competing unfairly and repeatedly attacked the Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for alleged bias, a charge Bezos and the paper deny.

Amazon is forging ahead. It now powers the websites for the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), according to a source and election security experts.

The FEC, DNC and RNC declined comment. A person familiar with the DNC’S plans said the committee has recently moved some data from AWS to Alphabet-owned