(TNS) — After several days of intermittent outages — culminating in people being unable to access many sites for extended periods on the first day of early voting — Florida county election office websites appeared to be working Tuesday .

In Broward, Elections Supervisor Joe Scott accelerated the move to a new provider, which now hosts the county’s elections website, browardvotes.gov.

Scott was an outspoken critic of the previous vendor, VR Systems, and said it would make a change after a widespread outage on the night of the Aug. 20 primary in Florida.

“Due to our website outage (Monday), we were forced to move a little faster than we wanted in terms of launching the new website our team was working on. At noon Monday, we officially switched our website to the website hosted by our new provider, Pantheon,” Scott said via email.

“As Monday was not planned as the official launch date, we are still in the process of ensuring that all information from our previous website is transferred to our current website. As always, we want to be proactive in ensuring all Broward voters have access to the information they need for the general election,” Scott said.

In Palm Beach County, the votepalmbeach.gov site has been “stable” since Monday afternoon, said Alison Novoa, director of strategic initiatives at the Supervisor of Elections Office.

VR Systems provides many election-related services for Florida’s state and county election offices, including hosting nearly all of Florida’s county election office websites. The latest problem, along with the VR systems issue that broke out Aug. 20, has nothing to do with systems involving voting and tabulation, election officials said.

“The public-facing website is completely separate from the voting systems,” Novoa said.

On August 20, the night of the primary and nonpartisan elections, citizens across the state could not access county election websites to see who was winning and losing.

Scott said that evening that he wanted to replace virtual reality for the website. Two days later, he and his information technology director began looking for a new website host and negotiating a contract. In September, Scott said the new provider would host Broward’s elections website by Election Day, Nov. 5.

Some applications on the Broward elections website still come from VR Services, but overall website hosting is now handled by Pantheon.

On Monday, the first day of early voting, people who went to county election office websites most often received a message that said “Florida Election Supervisors” at the top. “The website is currently in high demand. »

It had a drop-down menu that allowed users to click on the name of a county and go to a limited version of its election website. Sometimes, if users waited long enough, 20 to 30 minutes in one case, the web pages for the county’s main election office opened.

VR Systems responded to questions Monday with a prepared statement from COO Ben Martin:

“Our customers began experiencing intermittent outages of their websites last week. First of all, the ability to vote and have your vote counted is not affected by website outages. There is no indication of malicious activity…

“We immediately began investigating the cause and extent of this issue and remain in communication with Florida’s supervisors of elections. We have hired outside experts and implemented significant changes since the primary election. Our state and federal partners are helping to investigate and identify potential solutions. »

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