As voters in Broward County search for their polling location on Election Day, they may encounter a small glitch while using the county’s website.
If you visit browardvotes.gov and click on the link that says “Voter Information” you may receive an error message.
The Broward County Supervisor of Elections said this message has been popping up throughout the day.
“Under your voter info, you can look up things like check the status of your vote by mail ballot and also see your precinct and other information about your own voter file. That one has actually been having some intermittent problems today where it's been kind of up and down. I think it's getting a lot more volume than it can handle,” Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said.
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Scott is encouraging voters to use a secondary tool offered on the website labeled “Election Day Precincts.”
“So we have actually two different tools that people can use to look up their precinct. Probably the best one for people to use because it works for any address in Broward County is the button on Broward votes.gov. There's a button that says election day precincts. So I recommend that people use that tool first,” Scott said.
Scott said the website tool that is having issues is hosted by the third-party vendor VR Systems, Inc. VR Systems, Inc is the same vendor who previously hosted the county’s website during the primary election when the site experienced outages. Since then, the county has switched to a different website host but still maintains several tools operated by the previous vendor.
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“So the voter info tool is a third party hosted application, basically is being used throughout the whole state of Florida. And I think that the vendor who runs that may not have anticipated the amount of volume they were going to get today and just doesn't have enough, server, space to accommodate all the people that are trying to access that application today,” Scott said.
The state says “voting operations have not been impacted in any way. The county Supervisor of Elections’ websites are still operable for any voter to look up their registration status. The state’s courtesy website is encountering record-high traffic. Any voter having difficulty utilizing the state courtesy look-up web page should go to their county SOE webpage for the same service.”
NBC6 reached out to the third-party vendor, VR Systems, Inc, for comment on the current issues and are still waiting to hear back.
Miami-Dade has its own results reporting site and was unaffected in August. Its voter lookup section was working this morning, but anyone unable to use it to find out precinct information, the county said, can call 305-499-VOTE (8683).
