Two Weeks Until Election Day & Florida’s Early Voting Trends Are Trump’s Friend – Top 3 Takeaways – October 22nd, 2024
- We’re only two weeks away from Election Day and Florida’s Republicans turned out to vote early on the first day in a big way more on that in a moment... Heavy turnout for day one of early voting came despite another major issue with the web hosting company used by most election supervisors across the state, Tallahassee based VR Systems. VR Systems has hosted the websites for 64 out of the state’s 67 election supervisors including Broward, Palm Beach and Indian River Counties (notably Miami Dade and Martin County are two of the three exceptions and operated without issue on Monday). The 64 counties in question last had an issue with VR Systems in the last election. Florida’s August Primary election. That night, as polls closed, Floridians flocked to the webpages of their local elections supervisors and they were met without success. The state was quick to issue a statement. Florida’s Secretary of State Cord Byrd noted: This was an issue with their public-facing websites. It had nothing to do with the data or the votes being transmitted to the Department of State. It also didn’t slow down the tabulation or reporting of results – just the presentation of them on the VR hosted websites. Still, it was a bad look for sure, and an inconvenience for many, prompting the Chief Operating Officer of VR Systems to put out this note: We share everyone’s sense of urgency to identify why people may have experienced problems accessing our customers' websites. First and foremost, the election night reporting of the unofficial results was not impacted, and there is no indication of malicious activity. With our customer’s websites fully restored, we have begun working with external technical experts to assist us with further analyzing and optimizing our system to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Except that it did happen again and this time it was more than just an inconvenience. For about a three hour stretch on Monday, visitors to the impacted election supervisor’s websites were met with the message: The website is under heavy load at this time. It prevented voters from looking up early voting locations throughout the morning into the early afternoon, and in counties like Palm Beach, with 26 early voting locations, the ability to look up what the estimated wait times were at each location prior to going to early vote. After the first hiccup on primary Election Night, PBC’s Election Supervisor Wendy Link said: I don’t want anything like this to happen again, ever, especially not during a general election. And that’s exactly what just happened. One might imagine that changes may be coming for many counties – and in the case of Broward imminently. Before the problem had been resolved Broward’s Election Supervisor, Joe Scott told the Sun Sentinel: We have engaged with a new vendor and will be launching a new website, accessible at the same address, www.browardvotes.gov, as early as today. It’s clear that Broward wasn’t content to wait around to hear what the excuse would be from VR this time around. The old saying about fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me... would seemingly apply here. I’d imagine Broward won’t be the only county that will be changing its web hosting services. As for VR Systems their statement on Monday was reminiscent of their statement from Election Night in August: Our customers began experiencing intermittent outages of their websites last week. First and foremost, the ability to cast a ballot and have your vote counted is not impacted by the website outages. There is no indication of malicious activity. While we work to resolve this, we’ve posted a static web page that automatically populates for each Supervisor of Elections experiencing outages. These web pages are at the same website address and include links to the most critical services voters in those counties rely on. We immediately began investigating the cause and the extent of this issue and remain in communication with Florida Supervisors of Elections. We have engaged external experts and have implemented significant changes since the primary election. Our state and federal partners are involved in assisting with the investigation and identifying potential resolutions. But as for the actual vote...
- Republicans swamped the early vote out of the gate. Democrats entered the day with a statewide lead in votes cast of 71,096 votes. While we’re waiting to see the first statewide reporting by the Florida Division of Elections, what’s clear when checking locally available data is that Day 1 of early voting showed a significant Republican surge. In Palm Beach County, a Democrat majority county with nearly 43,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, Democrats entered the day with a lead of 30,070 votes through vote by mail ballots. By the end of the day that advantage was down to 29,374 votes. Republicans were ready to vote early on Monday as they outvoted Democrats in 22 of PBC’s 26 early voting locations. In total, Republicans outvoted Democrats in Palm Beach County by 4,660 voters on Monday. In the 2022 midterm elections, Palm Beach County broke for the entire Republican cabinet for the first time in the county’s history. It’s way too early to read too much into what we’re seeing based on just the first day of the early vote – but what’s clear is that Republicans were the most motivated to vote out of the gate across the state including in Palm Beach County. And speaking of Palm Beach County...
- Check the polls before you vote. Assuming that Palm Beach County’s site stays up for the rest of the early voting period, it’s well worth your time to use the online resource that shows you the estimated wait times for each of the early voting locations across the county. Yesterday, during the midday, after the website was back up and running, wait times were all over the map – literally. There were numerous locations across the county where wait times were estimated to be between 1-2 hours, at the same time locations only a few miles away had wait times of under 15 minutes. For example, the Jupiter Community Center paced at about a hour for much of the day while the West Jupiter Recreation and Community Center Complex allowed voters to essentially walk up and vote for most of the day. The early voting locations at the Main Library in West Palm Beach and the Lantana Library were frequently between 1-2 hour waits throughout the day while the Greenacres Community Center was under a 15-minute wait almost the entire day. In Boca, the Downtown Library was packed for almost the entire day with hour plus waits while the location at the Sugar Sand Park Community Center was readily available to walk up and vote almost all day. Ditto in West Boca where the West Boca Branch Library was an hour wait for most of the day with the Glades Road Branch Library under 15 minutes pretty much all day. You can literally save yourself an hour or two by checking out the traffic at the locations nearest you.