Florida county elections websites now working

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — After several days of intermittent outages — culminating in people unable to access many of the sites for long stretches on the first day of early voting — Florida county elections office websites appeared to be working on Tuesday.

In Broward, Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott accelerated the changeover to a new vendor, which is now hosting the county elections website, browardvotes.gov.

Scott has been an outspoken critic of the previous vendor, VR Systems, and had said he would make a change after an earlier widespread outage the night of the Aug. 20 Florida primary.

“Due to our website going down (Monday), we were forced to move a little quicker than we wanted to in terms of launching the new website our team had been working on. By midday Monday, we officially switched our website over to the website being hosted by our new vendor, Pantheon,” Scott said via email.

“Since Monday was not slated as being our official launch date, we are still in the process of making sure all of the information from our previous website is transferred to our current website. As always, we want to be proactive in making sure all Broward voters have access to the information they need for the general election,” Scott said.

In Palm Beach County, the votepalmbeach.gov website has been “stable” since Monday afternoon, said Alison Novoa, director of strategic initiatives at the supervisor of elections office.

VR Systems provides many elections related services for the state and county elections offices in Florida, including hosting almost all the county elections offices websites in Florida. The latest problem, as well as the VR Systems problem that erupted on Aug. 20, have nothing to do with the systems that involved voting and tabulation, elections officials said.

“The public-facing website is completely separate from the voting systems,” Novoa said.

On Aug. 20, the night of primary and nonpartisan elections, people throughout the state couldn’t access county elections websites to see who was winning and losing.

Scott said that night he wanted to replace VR for the website. Two days later, he and his information technology director began looking for a new website host and began negotiating a contract. In September, Scott said the new vendor would be hosting the Broward elections website by Election Day, Nov. 5.

Some applications on the Broward elections website are still coming from VR Services, but the overall website hosting is now done by Pantheon.

On Monday, the first day of early voting, people who went to county elections office websites most often got a message that read “Florida Supervisors of Elections,” at the top. “The website is under heavy load at this time.”

It had a drop-down menu that allowed people to click on a county name and go to a limited version of its elections website. Sometimes, if users waited long enough, 20 to 30 minutes in one case, the main county elections office webpages would open.

VR Systems responded to questions Monday with a prepared statement from Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin:

“Our customers began experiencing intermittent outages of their websites last week. First and foremost, the ability to cast a ballot and have your vote counted is not impacted by the website outages. There is no indication of malicious activity….

“We immediately began investigating the cause and the extent of this issue and remain in communication with Florida Supervisors of Elections. We have engaged external experts and have implemented significant changes since the primary election. Our state and federal partners are involved in assisting with the investigation and identifying potential resolutions.”

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