TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Some Florida counties had difficulty Tuesday reporting primary election results to the public because of an unspecified glitch involving a vendor, state officials said.
News 6 Reporter Mark Lehman spoke with Mary Jane Arrington, Osceola County’s supervisor of elections, the day after.
“It’s my understanding that the speed on our internet just slowed down to a crawl,” Arrington said. “It was concerning, but at least we had social media outlets to help us get that information out. We wanted to see the most current results and it put stress on this system where it was not functioning.”
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Secretary of State Cord Byrd said at a news conference that counties using the vendor VR Systems reported the issue, which included websites timing out.
“This was an issue with their public-facing websites. It had nothing to do with the data or the votes being transmitted to the Department of State,” Byrd said.
VR Systems COO Ben Martin issued the following statement on the issue:
The elections supervisor in Hillsborough County, Craig Latimer, said in a statement that the unknown problem caused “intermittent down time and slowness” on its websites but there was no interference with tabulation of votes. Hillsborough County includes the city of Tampa.
“The public website is completely separate from the vote tabulation system, voter registration system or election night results reporting website,” according to the statement.
Arrington told Lehman that the Osceola County Supervisor of Elections Office has since also been in contact with VR Systems, which hosts the office’s website.
“We have spoken with them. They told us they started working on it immediately, because this can never happen again,” Arrington said.
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