Across Florida, voters seeking information about their registration status were blocked this morning when the company that hosts county Supervisors of Elections websites shut down access due to security concerns. 

VR Systems, the Tallahassee-based elections technology firm that Florida uses, pulled some public-facing parts of its websites after the PHP Foundation, which oversees the open-source programming language, identified critical vulnerabilities that could impact digital infrastructure across the world.  

The website troubles come at a critical time with early voting already underway and the midterm elections less than two weeks away.

On Sarasota County’s Supervisor of Elections website, for example, voters cannot look at sample ballots or find voting locations. The voter registration tool operated by the Florida Department of State appears to still be active.

Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections website displayed a notice Wednesday, Oct. 21, warning voters that some online lookup tools were temporarily unavailable. The outage affected election websites across Florida as early voting got underway. | Screenshot of the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections website

Evelyn Almodóvar, the director of the Latino education and civic engagement group UnidosNow, was working on get-out-the-vote efforts with the Hispanic Federation of Florida when she noticed the outage. 

“We had a whole bunch of volunteers and students doing this work today,” Almodóvar said. Volunteers with her group are now asking voters to look at the map of Manatee County on the Supervisor of Elections website to see what district they are voting in. 

“That certainly doesn’t help voter confidence right now,” Almodóvar said. 

PHP open-source programming is a massive pillar of digital infrastructure. About 69% of the internet uses PHP, according to W3Techs, an internet survey platform. The software programmers announced on Wednesday that vulnerabilities discovered by OpenAI made websites that use PHP vulnerable to hackers and cyberattacks.

“Given the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory,” OpenAI said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Ben Martin, the chief operations officer of VR Systems, told Suncoast Searchlight the company took down the service at 10 a.m. Wednesday in response to warnings by the PHP programmers. He said the programs would not go back online until VR Systems has completed testing, but was unsure about whether that would be a timeline of hours or days. 

“It’s critical to understand that this does not affect the ability to vote, only the ability to look up information,” Martin said. “This does not affect the voter rolls.”

Paul Donnelly, a spokesperson for the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections, confirmed in an email that some of the office’s web tools have unexpectedly been taken offline for VR Systems to perform maintenance. He said the office is directing voters to its call center for assistance in the meantime. 

“We hope the tools will be back online shortly,” Donnelly said. ”But I do not currently have a resolution time from the vendor.”

Alice Herman is a watchdog/investigative reporter for Suncoast Searchlight. Email her at alice@suncoastsearchlight.org. Christian Casale covers government and politics for Suncoast Searchlight. Email him at christian@suncoastsearchlight.org.