Shortly before the polls closed in Tuesday’s Democratic and Republican primaries and nonpartisan elections, the people most anxious to learn the results — candidates, political operatives, consultants and news reporters — started logging on to county elections offices websites.
When the polls close, ballots already tabulated from early voting and mail voting are normally posted immediately. Results weren’t showing up.
People started getting error messages as the outside vendor that hosts websites for almost all the 67 county supervisors of elections offices in Florida was overwhelmed. Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott, who has an extensive technology background, said his understanding was that VR Systems’ servers couldn’t handle the onslaught of traffic from so many people trying to see the results at once.
In a memo distributed Wednesday afternoon, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said the problem impacted the display of election results “across most counties in Florida.”
On Wednesday, VR Systems took “full responsibility” in a statement from its chief operating officer.
ELECTIONS SECURE
The integrity of the elections was never in jeopardy and the counting of ballots was not affected in any way, Scott and Link said in telephone interviews Wednesday.
Tabulation of votes is handled by separate systems that have nothing to do with the posting of results that the public can see, they said.
“There’s a separate system that counts the votes,” Scott said. “The tabulation system is not on the Internet.”
Link said that the “tabulation of the ballots is completely separate from the reporting of the results. So there is no crossover concern … The only thing that affected us was the releasing of the results to the public through our website.”
Scott suggested thinking of it as a scoreboard. Results from the tabulation system are transferred to the system that displays the results. Link said that was a good description.
Both elections supervisors underscored the integrity of the voting system. Scott and Link also said they’re concerned about anything that gives anyone misgivings — and about people who intentionally try to spread disinformation and decrease trust in elections and voting. In the hyper-partisan atmosphere of voting conspiracy theories fueled in recent years by former President Donald Trump, some people are inclined to believe the worst, and not accept obvious explanations.
“We’re always concerned that there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation that’s out there all the time. And any time there is something that actually happens that can bolster those concerns is something that we’re focused on and concerned about,” Link said.
Scott said some people will use any type of glitch to undermine elections.
“There are people out there who don’t believe in democracy. And they want to make people feel like elections cannot be relied upon, and any little hiccup or anything that goes wrong they are going to take advantage of that,” Scott said. “They are coming from this place where they don’t want people to believe in elections.”
The inability to access election results on the website Tuesday night created doubts for Deborah Adeimy. She finished third of three candidates in the Republican primary in the Palm Beach County 22nd Congressional District.
Adeimy said Wednesday it didn’t make sense to her that she lost, and suspects that something nefarious happened while the results weren’t being publicly reported.
“Hell yes. I’m not beating around the bush. Hell yes, that’s what I’m saying,” she said in a phone interview. “I’m looking at everything and it just didn’t add up.” Adeimy added that, “It’s surprising. It’s suspicious.”
She doesn’t accept the explanation of “heavy traffic” for the failure. “I am going to look into it further,” she said.
At the elections offices, Link and Scott said, ballot tabulation proceeded, unimpeded by the failure of VR Systems to display the results on the counties’ websites.
And, Scott said, the official transmitting of results from the county elections office to the state — which has strict legal deadlines on election night — was never impeded. The state received all the results as required, he said.
Link and Scott are Democrats. Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, a Republican appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, said at a news conference Tuesday night in Tallahassee that he was aware of “issues” with counties’ websites “communicating with VR Systems.”
Byrd said that did not impede the legally required transmitting of county results to the state. “All of the information and vote tallies were timely reported,” Byrd said. “This is 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, and we were able to access it.”
On Wednesday, Byrd said the election was “smooth and orderly” in a statement. “Voters cast their ballots with confidence, knowing that their votes were securely and accurately counted,” he said.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Scott said he was notified by a VR Systems representative in a 6:49 p.m. phone call that the company was experiencing problems.
He said he was told by the company representative that VR Systems servers were overwhelmed, unable to handle the onslaught of traffic from so many people trying to access the websites at once.
Based on that conversation, Scott said he was led to believe there would be a momentary website interruption that would be over and done with by the time the polls actually closed at 7 p.m. and his office began posting results.
It ended up lasting more than an hour.
Scott has an extensive technology background. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he studied computer science. After finishing his service as an Army captain, Scott got an MBA and worked in technology roles for several companies.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that there was any kind of foul play involved in this. It was more or less poor infrastructure on the part of the vendor that is the most likely culprit,” Scott said, adding he wants to see more information from VR Systems.
Scott said he based his assessment on “my knowledge of my interactions I’ve had with the company during the past three-and-a-half years and what I know about the company,” he said. Scott became elections supervisor in January 2021; he was reelected on Tuesday.
At his Tuesday night news conference, Byrd offered a similar explanation. “It’s a vendor issue and we’ll be able to get to the bottom of it,” the secretary of state said, adding that his office had “no credible information” that there was any kind of malicious attack.
He said he would have information technology people from the Division of Elections work with the vendor to determine just what happened.
VR Systems hasn’t clearly explained what happened.
In an email Wednesday to supervisors of elections and statement to the news media, the company offered what it called a “clarification” of the website issues from chief operating officer Ben Martin.
“All of the customers’ websites that we host were impacted, and we take full responsibility,” he said “The websites were down as we took steps to correct issues that were caused by logging that was enabled as a security measure on the sites. Once we resolved this, all of the sites were restored. To ensure this doesn’t happen again, we have begun working with external technical experts to assist us with further analyzing and optimizing our system.”
In a statement Tuesday night, Martin didn’t acknowledge a problem had actually occurred, saying instead “people may have experienced problems.” Even though he didn’t say definitely there were problems, Martin said “there is no indication of malicious activity.”
This was his explanation: The log-recording action on the content management system serving the websites for elections offices that are VR Systems customers “began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites. We believe this put extraordinary stress on the system.”
PLAN B
The outage lasted more than an hour, Scott said. Early on, people statewide began to post complaints on social media.
In Broward, the elections office began livestreaming an internal feed of the in-house results page on Facebook and Instagram. Scott himself was holding two smartphones to capture what was on the internal display at election headquarters.
If VR systems had given an indication of the length of the outage, Scott said he and his office would have taken more steps to get election results more broadly distributed to the public.
In Palm Beach County, Link said she and her staff realized just after 7 p.m. there was a problem, and began implementing contingency plans.
One step was to feed results directly to Channel 20, the county government’s livestream and cable channel. That backup had been planned in advance, but her staff checked first with system operators to make sure that any influx of traffic wouldn’t be overwhelming. Link said the county also activated a backup website to post results.
“We had contingency plans in place,” Link said. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about a variety of things that could possibly go wrong from hurricanes to fires to (denial of service) attacks to hacking. We discuss what we would do in various situations, and we have backup plans for all of them.”
WHAT IS VR SYSTEMS?
Founded in 1992 as a family-owned business, Tallahassee-based VR Systems is owned by its employees through a stock ownership plan, which was implemented in 2010.
The company offers several products to election departments, including its EViD electronic pollbook, which stands for Electronic Voter Identification. In 2016, more than 14,000 were in use in Florida, California, Illinois, North Carolina, New York, Virginia and West Virginia.
VR Systems also makes voter registration software, offers online training for election agency workers and provides website services for elections.
One problem, Scott said Tuesday night, is that VR Systems effectively has a monopoly on some services elections offices need to procure. That concerned Broward Mayor Nan Rich, a member of the county’s three-person elections Canvassing Board, who said she would like to see competition for what VR Services provides.
GOING FORWARD
Scott said he was “very unhappy with their performance, and I’ve actually been vocal about that in the past. It’s not as if they’re going to be surprised that I’m very unhappy with their service because they’ve heard it before.”
Scott said he would seek proposals from other vendors for the Broward elections website, but said it might not be possible to design and test a news system before the November general election.
Link said she was not prepared to dump VR Systems, but said “they’ve got to focus on making sure it’s right.”
Link, president-elect of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association, said “there is frustration in terms of could they, should they have anticipated what occurred. I don’t know. Certainly we all count on them to be able to handle the traffic and deliver the product that we have contracted for.”
“Certainly it’s been a topic of discussion among supervisors today,” Link said.
DeSantis, who has spoken frequently about the need to ensure secure elections, said Wednesday at an event in Sarasota that he was not aware of any issues posting results online.
He referred questions about it to Byrd, adding he was confident his secretary of state would get it fixed in time for the general election. “Hopefully it was just a website issue.”
Orlando Sentinel staff writer Jeffrey Schweers contributed to this report.
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