Tallahassee-based tech company takes responsibility for local elections websites crashing

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — It was a rocky election night for several Tampa Bay counties.

As voters went to check the results, many local elections websites were crashing. Now, an elections tech company is taking full responsibility.

The problems stemmed from a vendor which services election supervisor sites across the state. That company, VR Systems, is based in Tallahassee.

“Right around 7 o’clock our website went down,” said Craig Latimer, Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections. “We noticed that it was slowing down before that.”

Voters, candidates, and journalists count on election supervisor sites to stay informed on race results. When the sites crashed, it left many in the dark.

8 On Your Side asked if the problem impacted the counting of votes, but Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Craig Latimer said his county still reported complete results to state officials by 9:30 p.m. Tuesday.

“The only thing that went down is our public facing website votehillsborough.gov,” Latimer said . “The most important thing about it is to know that it didn’t affect voting. It didn’t affect tabulation in any way shape or form.”

Latimer said voter turnout was poor in Hillsborough, under 20%. In Sarasota County, it was about 32% but a similar story. Sarasota Election Supervisor Ron Turner released this statement, defending their ballot collection and counting process:

VR Systems’ website issues on election night had nothing to do with ballots, the tabulation of those ballots or the reporting of results. Security is a top priority, and we employ strict chain-of-custody procedures at every step of the voting process. Once in our possession, ballots are logged and securely stored in dual-access, alarmed facilities with 24-hour camera surveillance until those ballots are tabulated. Once tabulated, those same ballots are stored for a minimum of 22 months using the security features listed above.

Sarasota Election Supervisor Ron Turner

Both Sarasota and Hillsborough Counties use VR Systems to maintain their sites and they’re not alone. Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd said counties across Florida using VR Systems reported similar issues on primary night.

“We were able to access on our election watch.gov website it was once again with the county level public facing websites that they had a problem, so it’s a vendor issue and we’ll get to the bottom of it of what happened,” Byrdsaid .

VR Systems COO Ben Martin, released this statement:

Based on our analysis of today’s event, we believe the logging that was enabled as a security measure was at the root of the issues that our customers experienced. This log records the action on the content management system serving our customers’ websites. Late in the day, it began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites. We believe this put extraordinary stress on the system.

VR Systems COO Ben Martin,

In other words, the local election sites just weren’t ready for the amount of traffic they got that night. VR Systems has not told us what they plan to do to prevent this from happening again in November and with the election just 75 days away, 8 On Your Side will be sure to stay on this and let you know what happens.

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