ORLANDO, Fla. – County elections websites across Florida are back online after being down for much of the morning because of an issue with the company that manages them.
Several of Central Florida’s elections supervisors tell News 6 that the public websites for their offices went down Monday morning on the first day of early voting, but they were back up just before 1 p.m.
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None of the offices’ internal election systems were affected though, just the public website.
All of the websites that went down operate on VR Tower, a product of VR Systems, a company based out of Tallahassee.
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A note on the backup website that came up Monday said, “The website you are trying to reach is under heavy load at this time.”
It then gave visitors a drop-down menu, where they could access a temporary county website to look up voter information like Election Day precincts. However, many of the temporary websites did not have links or information about early voting locations. It also offered links to state websites to register to vote or check voter status.
Voter registration in Florida ended on Oct. 7.
VR Tower is supposed to provide an easily accessible website-building system that is user-friendly and able to handle heavy traffic, according to the company’s website. A spokesperson for the Lake County supervisor of elections said the sites were briefly down the previous week as VR Systems conducted testing and upgrades.
The sites also went down on the night of the Aug. 20 primary. VR Systems said the glitch appeared to be caused by one of the security measures that became overwhelmed by the growth of web traffic throughout the day. The company did not think the glitches were a sign of malicious activity.
Ben Martin, chief operating officer for VR Systems, issued this statement to News 6 on Monday:
“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.
“While we work to resolve this, we’ve posted a static web page that automatically populates for each Supervisor of Elections experiencing outages. These web pages are at the same website address and include links to the most critical services voters in those counties rely on.
“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.”
Ben Martin, COO of VR Systems
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