TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV/Gray Florida Capital Bureau) – Election technology company VR Systems is taking “full responsibility” for the outage of county election officials’ websites Tuesday night. Most county election officials’ websites were unavailable during voting in Florida’s primary election.

“Nobody likes to hear the word ‘elections’ and the issues that come with it,” said Blake Dowling, owner of Aegis Biz Tech.

The problem only affected websites hosted by VR Systems, which happens to account for most of the election authorities in Florida’s counties. The Tallahassee-based company said the problem was caused by logging used as a security measure. It said the increased traffic strained the system and slowed websites to a halt. Blake Dowling, owner of Aegis Biz Tech, said it’s hard to predict such outages.

“Whether it’s Ticketmaster or elections, we can all be surprised. In some cases the volume is comparable to that in the city center,” Dowling said.

VR Systems said the company is currently working with external experts to optimize its system so that a similar problem will not occur in November.

Secretary of State Cord Byrd said the state would also address the issue before the general election.

“After every election, we reassess, dive deep into any problems that may have arisen and work to fix them for the next time,” said Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd.

Byrd said there were no problems with the election itself, just with accessing results on some websites. He reminded people that they can always find county and state election results on the Florida Election Watch website.

VR Systems’ website says the company is working with election officials in five other states and Washington, DC.

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