Some early voters in Florida were met with challenges while attempting to cast their early ballots in the 2024 presidential election. Early voting began Monday, Oct. 21, in the Sunshine State as some voters faced long lines and election offices dealt with crashing websites.
Election offices in Broward and Palm Beach counties experienced an outage, and others like Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas all published backup sites due to their systems crashing.
“We recognize the importance of having a fully functional website during these critical times for Broward voters,” Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said in a statement. “We are doing everything possible to minimize any disruption of services.”
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A similar incident happened the night of Aug. 20 during Florida’s primary election. When people visited election websites for results, the sites were unable to handle the influx of traffic, causing an outage and prompting frustrations from elections officials.
Floridas Secretary of State Cord Byrd called the primary outage a “vendor issue” and said elections officials were looking to get to the bottom of what happened.
However, those same issues became apparent Monday during Florida’s first day of early voting.
Scott told the Sun Sentinel his office has engaged with a new website vendor and they’re launching a new website, accessible using the same address to avoid any more website issues during the election season.
According to state numbers, 377,035 Floridians cast their ballots on the first day of early voting, and just over 1.3 million mail-in ballots have been returned.
Election Day is two weeks away, Tuesday, Nov. 5.
