Members of the Santa Rosa County Republican Executive Committee are not accepting explanations from the Florida Secretary of State or Ben Martin, the chief operating officer of VR Systems, that a simple "glitch" caused e lection supervisor websites to crash across the state Tuesday.
"This is a serious security issue that should be considered a National Security Breach," member Diane Warner said in an email to Santa Rosa County Supervisor of Elections Tappie Villane .
Nine members of the REC gathered Tuesday as Villane and her staff worked to certify election results from the week before. Warner reached out to the Pensacola News Journal afterward to say the group had contested the certification and called upon Villane to conduct a forensic audit of the results of the Aug. 20 Primary.
She said Villane had agreed to ask the state for the requested audit.
Villane, though, said that she had not agreed to ask the state for an audit and actually only agreed to forward the group of poll monitors' request for one to the state.
"All they asked is if I would forward their request. I forwarded exactly what they sent me," she said. "If the state decides they want to conduct a forensic audit, so be it."
Election supervisors websites crashed in multiple Florida counties on Tuesday after the company that supports the sites said they suffered "extraordinary stress."
"We believe the logging that was enabled as a security measure was at the root of the issues that our customers experienced," VR Systems, the Tallahassee-based elections software company , told the Tallahassee Democrat.
Logging means the automatic recording of everything that happens on a website, such as who's using it and how, including which pages are viewed and what information is downloaded.
"Late in the day, (the logging) began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites," the company told the Tallahassee newspaper. Even before the first polls closed at 7 p.m., many Floridians were forced to bypass their county election supervisors' websites and find results elsewhere.
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In Santa Rosa and Escambia counties, election results were posted throughout the evening on the local supervisor of election sites and available to the public as votes were tallied, as they are every election. The specific number of precincts reporting, however, was not noted on the local sites until later in the evening.
In a press briefing, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd made clear there were no problems with the data or vote tallies being transmitted to the Department of State, the Democrat said. He said it was a county-level issue and there was "no evidence at this juncture" that the technical difficulties were due to a cyber attack.
"This is not an issue with the Florida Department of State and in no way affects Floridaelectionwatch.gov," Byrd said at the press conference. "All of the information and vote tallies were timely reported to the Department of State."
That didn't prevent Santa Rosa County's REC from building a worse case scenario.
"As Americans, we deserve secure and transparent elections. The Aug. 20, 2024 “glitch” (failure) throughout the State of Florida proves we now have a Constitutional Crisis & National Security Breach to resolve," Warner said in her email to Villane. "The outrageously expensive electronic voting systems glitch (failure) appears to be a ongoing, reoccurring nightmare. Please use the blackout failure as an opportunity to turn the light to truth and transparency and do the right thing."
Warner notified Villane that due to the "failures of VR Systems" the supervisor should include in her communication with the state a notification that the certification of the Primary had been contested and a call for a full forensic audit to include tallies of early voting, vote by mail and in person.
She also wanted Villane to request that the state provide a complete explanation of the VR Systems failure that included specific details of the breakdown, "actual technical proof," and the names of those responsible for what happened and the party or parties that fixed the glitch.
In an updated statement released the day after the Aug. 20 Primary, VR Systems said the glitches affected every clients' website that they host, and they "take full responsibility."
One news outlet reported 61 counties had been impacted.
VR Systems said the glitches weren't a sign of malicious activity like hacking and said the websites had been fully restored: "We have begun working with external technical experts to assist us with further analyzing and optimizing our system to ensure this doesn’t happen again."
In 2016, VR Systems was also the victim of cyberattack attempts by Russia to influence the U.S. presidential election, according to published reports and local election officials, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Hackers with the Russian military sent phishing emails posing as VR Systems employees to local government organizations, according to leaked National Security Agency documents. Phishing refers to hackers luring people into opening harmless looking email attachments that contain malicious programs.
As previously reported in June of 2017 , information taken in the attack — perhaps including email contacts of VR Systems’ clients — was likely used to launch a subsequent hacking operation in the fall. Russian hackers reportedly sent a malicious email from an account called “vr.elections@gmail.com” to up to 122 local government offices.
At the time, Mindy Perkins, CEO of VR Systems, said in a statement there was no sign the intended victims were compromised.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Santa Rosa Republicans call for forensic audit after minor glitches on election sites
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