Our Green Advantage

Simply Voting is an eco-friendly online voting system. Using our service helps your organization meet its environmental and sustainability objectives by drastically reducing the carbon footprint of voting events.

Environmental Impact of Voting

The carbon footprint is a measure of the impact an organization or event has on the environment, and in particular climate change. It relates to the amount of harmful greenhouse gases emitted through transport, land clearance, and the production and consumption of food, fuels, manufactured goods, materials, wood, roads, buildings, and services. The carbon footprint is measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalent.

Let’s compare the environmental impact of common methods of voting using rough approximations…

Holding an in-person paper ballot election for 10,000 voters generates considerable greenhouse gas emissions. While the individual sheets of ballot paper are equivalent to 40kg¹ of CO₂, getting voters to the polling station and back has the greatest impact. Assuming half the voters walk and half drive a typical distance² to the polling station in a typical car³, the travel generates 4700kg⁴. Total: 4740kg of CO₂.

Holding a mail-in ballot for 10,000 voters is much better. More paper is required for a vote-by-mail package, equivalent to 120kg¹. Letter mail delivery to the voters and back generates 400kg⁵. Total: 520kg of CO₂.

Holding an election online for 10,000 voters, sending credentials by email, is by far the best. There is no paper or travel involved, and sending the emails is equivalent to 40kg⁶. Assuming the voter’s device uses 200W/h and it would take five minutes to vote, voting would generate an additional 80kg⁷. Total: 120kg of CO₂.

However the online voting system itself still has a carbon footprint because electricity is required to power the servers that host your voting website. Furthermore, running the company that runs these servers generates emissions…

Our Servers are Green

The good news is that we’ve lowered our carbon footprint to a small fraction of a typical website by hosting servers in a data center that scores high in these areas:

Emissions from Electrical Power Source

There is a drastic difference in CO₂ output by power source. According to publicly available data, burning coal can generate 820 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt hour. Natural gas is better at 490 grams, but hydroelectricity is much better at 24 grams⁸. Our data centres are located in areas powered exclusively by hydroelectricity and are therefore much greener than identical data centres in most other states and provinces in North America.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)

The next consideration is power usage effectiveness (PUE), a measure of how efficiently the data center uses its power, developed by The Green Grid. PUE is the ratio of total of power used by a facility to the power actually delivered to computing equipment. An ideal PUE is 1.0, but in reality quite a bit of power must be used for supporting infrastructure such as lighting, cooling, etc. Our efficient data centers are engineered for a PUE of 1.5, which is better than average⁹.

IT Efficiency

Over time computers have improved the performance delivered per watt. However, our servers are not individual computers – they are virtualized in an enterprise cloud environment. Cloud computing has the potential to drastically reduce emissions – and according to research, a virtualization setup yields 6x the computing power per watt of equivalent traditional physical servers¹⁰.

Our Company is Green

Even more good news, at Simply Voting we choose clean, pollution-free power for our electricity requirements. Bullfrog’s generators put green electricity onto the grid to match the amount of electricity we use. Bullfrog ensures the energy going onto the grid for our offices is from clean, renewable sources, displacing energy from polluting sources.

As a bullfrogpowered location, we are:

• CLEANING UP our air and water
• TAKING ACTION on climate change
• SUPPORTING community-based green energy projects
• LEADING the way to a renewably powered future

How Bullfrog Power Works

Looking Forward

While we have made strides to help our customers reduce their environmental impact, we are committed to ever improving our sustainable business practices and minimizing our collective footprint.

Footnotes

1. https://c.environmentalpaper.org/individual.html
2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-political-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/i-came-i-saw-i-voted-distance-to-polling-locations-and-voter-turnout-in-ontario-canada/84EB73738B9DE67B869A013432566C02
3. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1177-march-15-2021-preliminary-data-show-average-fuel-economy-new-light
4. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/transportation/fuel-efficient-technologies/autosmart_factsheet_6_e.pdf
5. https://www.pb.com/docs/US/pdf/Our-Company/Corporate-Responsibility/The-Environmental-Impact-of-Mail-A-Baseline-White-Paper.pdf
6. https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/the-thought-experiment-what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-an-email/
7. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-co2-status-report-2019/emissions
8. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-electricity.aspx
9. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1229367/data-center-average-annual-pue-worldwide/
10. https://greeneconomypost.com/virtualization-data-center-energy-efficiency-19009.htm