Problems on Florida primary night with elections websites blamed on vendor VR Systems
The websites of several county election supervisors were down or struggled to load as polls closed on Tuesday, but Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd said it wasn’t because of nefarious intent.
A vendor, Tallahassee-based VR Systems, was having “issues” with county supervisors’ public-facing websites, Byrd told reporters Tuesday night. He did not know the exact nature of the issues.
Supervisors’ homepages in Pinellas, Leon, Broward and other counties struggled to load, but direct links to Tuesday’s primary results appeared to be unaffected.
A VR Systems employee who spoke to the Herald/Times on the phone Tuesday night said she could not answer questions and referred a reporter to a media relations email account. The company did not immediately respond.
Broward Supervisor Joe Scott said VR Systems contacted his office before polls closed at 7 p.m. to say they were “getting a lot of traffic.” Scott said a similar issue occurred in August of 2022.
“I’m very unhappy about the situation,” he said
Scott said that his office had been in communication with the vendor, which he said has taken full responsibility and will release a statement. Scott said Broward County has gradually made moves to transition to a competitor, Tenex.
“I have every intention of not using them for our website in the future,” Scott said.
Scott said that while the Broward elections website is up and running, it is moving at a more sluggish pace in part because VR Systems servers could not handle the increased traffic on election night. The issue has not affected the county’s ability to tabulate votes, he said.
Roberto Rodriguez, Miami-Dade’s deputy supervisor of elections, said that Miami-Dade also uses VR Systems but was not experiencing any issues with its website Tuesday night.
Byrd said that the issue had nothing to do with votes or votes being transmitted to the Secretary of State. The state’s results page, floridaelectionwatch.gov, was unaffected.
“We’re in communication with the vendor, but we have no credible information that it’s any type of cyber or DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack,” Byrd said.
In a Sarasota press conference on Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he hadn’t heard of the website issues in loading election results but that Byrd “will press the issue.”
“Hopefully it was just a website thing. Sometimes that happens but we want to make sure that for the general election it’s good,” DeSantis said.
Herald/Times reporter Alexandra Glorioso, and Miami Herald reporter Catherine Odom and editor David Smiley contributed to this report.
This story was originally published August 20, 2024 at 9:35 PM.
