Florida county election websites briefly hit with glitches shortly after polls close: Here's what happened

Several county websites in Florida reportedly experienced issues displaying election results shortly after polls closed Tuesday night in Florida's primary contest, according to Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd. Counties had to rely on an alternative website to display results. 

During a Tuesday evening press conference, Secretary Byrd told reporters that the state was "aware that some counties are having issues with their websites communicating with VR systems." He said the issue was strictly limited to public-facing websites and that it had no impacts on counties reporting election votes to the state or issues with the state accessing that data.

"We've offered our support to help supervisors with their issues with their vendor," he said.

In an update on Wednesday, VR Systems Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin shared the following statement about the incident:

"We want to clarify our response to what happened yesterday to the websites we host for county supervisors of elections in Florida."All of the customers' websites that we host were impacted, and we take full responsibility."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."

Secretary Byrd said there is no evidence to indicate this was anything more than a vendor issue, dismissing the possibility that this was the result of a cyberattack or something more nefarious. Follow-up questions to the state, including how many counties were impacted, were not immediately returned.

Brevard County and Lake County both experienced brief issues, but like other counties, relied on a backup website that the public could access to see election results. Orange County and Seminole County reported no issues, according to their spokespersons.

Osceola County Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington posted on X shortly before 7:30 p.m. that a "majority" of Supervisor of Elections websites were down due to issues with the "website host." An email sent to Arrington for additional comment was not immediately returned.