JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Several Florida counties reported the software they use for their elections results websites was not working Tuesday night after polls closed.
Clay County and Duval County confirmed to First Coast News that their election websites were not functioning around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Duval County Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland says the company they work with, VR Systems, had technical difficulties. By about 10 p.m., the website was operational again.
News outlets around the state reported outages, including counties in the Panhandle and South Florida.
For about two hours, some counties, including Duval and Clay, used a workaround where there websites redirected to an "unofficial" election results page.
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd said during a press conference the election was not compromised by the technical issue.
“This was an issue with their public facing websites," said Byrd. "It had nothing to do with the votes being transmitted to the department of state.”
Byrd emphasized the way votes are collected and tabulated is separate from how the results are displayed.
“All of the information and vote tallies were timely reported to the department of state," Byrd said.
Byrd says the department of state is working with the vendor, VR Systems, to figure out what went wrong. “We have no credible information that it was any type of cyber or D-Dos attack."
VR Systems is not new for many elections offices. In fact, Duval Supervisor or Elections Jerry Holland says they’ve been using it for more than a decade.
“Where we first went to this provider, we had problems that election night, but since then it’s been a very accurate system," said Holland.
Holland says they’ll work with the vendor to figure out the issue before even more people will be checking for outcomes in a few months.
“This election, we had about 120,000 people voting," said Holland. "In the next election, we’ll have 500,000 people interested in the results. So, we want to make sure this thing is operational come November.”