The Ottawa County Clerk’s Office election results webpage was down for more than an hour after the site crashed around 9:20 p.m. Tuesday, leaving visitors unable to see anything on the website as preliminary results were coming in.
Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck said the website’s server likely crashed due to heavy visitor traffic during a short period of time.
Roebuck said there was an immediate influx of visitors because he sent out an email and text alert when the first batch of election results had been posted, causing thousands of people to rush to the county’s website all at once starting around 9:20 p.m.
The county’s election results website had approximately 30,000 users and was refreshed roughly 129,000 times during the hour from 9-10 p.m. on Aug. 6, said Paul Klimas, the county’s innovation and technology director.
At the same time as the website was receiving an influx in visitors, officials were also uploading new election results into the county database, Klimas said. With a “large activity load” coming from both ends of the website, the website’s central processing unit (CPU) was overwhelmed and “maxed out,” causing it to crash.
“This was a purely traffic driven problem where, despite testing on the website in the two weeks leading up to the election, we essentially had a situation where we had very heavy traffic all at one time on the election webpage, which essentially cause the server to go down for the website,” Roebuck told MLive/The Grand Rapids Press.
Roebuck said Ottawa County has been using the same elections results website for the last 10 years, and it generally works very well.
“This was an added challenge that we certainly did not foresee, particularly in the testing – It’s hard to stress test or to know what to stress test, but that particular issue was not something we really experienced before,” he said.
During the roughly 90 minutes that the website was down, visitors who tried to access the site couldn’t see any election results and were met by a loading blank page, or a “404 Error.” But Roebuck said county officials were able to upload the preliminary results on PDF pages that were linked to the website within 15 minutes of the website crashing.
“So we had very little time during the evening where there were no results being posted,” he said. “But obviously, the PDF results are a little more difficult to read and interpret, which is why we’ve used the website more extensively.”
Ottawa County officials are working to beef up the county’s elections results webpage before the November presidential election to ensure a crash doesn’t happen again.
Klimas said the county’s IT (information technology) department is considering separating the published database from the master database for future elections, so that the website isn’t getting overwhelmed with activity on both ends at the same time.
But Roebuck also thinks that visitor traffic won’t be as high on the county website during the November general election, because people won’t be checking their local county website for results of the presidential election, instead checking national sources as results are coming in across the country.
“No one’s going to the Ottawa County clerk’s office website to look at Donald Trump’s totals for Ottawa County or Kamala Harris’s totals for Ottawa County,” he said.
Roebuck said he believes interest in Ottawa County’s August preliminary election was probably higher because of several key local races that voters were tuning into, including some high-stakes county board seats that were up for grabs.
But Roebuck said the county is still planning to ensure its website can handle a large influx of traffic if that does happen again in the Nov. 5 election.
“We’re completely planning for as much or more traffic in November, just so that we can be as prepared as possible and make sure that everything is up and functioning well,” he said.
Aside from the website malfunction after polls closed, Roebuck said voting went smoothly on Election Day. There was slightly lower turnout in the morning due to storms that hit West Michigan that day, but overall, total turnout was 34.5%, which is right around what Roebuck had expected for the August primary election.
A total of 83,143 ballots were cast in the Tuesday, Aug. 6 election, out of a total 240,976 registered voters in Ottawa County, according to the unofficial result summary.
One slight issue that a handful of precincts dealt with in the morning hours was humidity in the air from the storms, which Roebuck said can affect the ballot paper.
The tabulators are sensitive to the thickness of the paper, so some voters had to insert their ballot a couple of times because the tabulator was rejecting the ballot due to the humidity, he said.
Roebuck said the humidity was only an issue when turnout was already low during the morning hours, so it didn’t lead to huge lines. The mugginess only impacted a couple local precincts, including some in the city of Holland and Grand Haven Township, he said.
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