Scott Powers
Orange County voters wanting to check online for information on the first day of early voting were out of luck Monday morning.
The Orange County Supervisor of Elections website was down.
Supervisor Bill Cowles said the site has not been hacked and said there are no security problems.
“The problem is on our server,” he said.
The office was seeking Monday morning to develop a workaround that would redirect internet inquiries to another site for information about the 2020 elections, including who is running, and how voters may vote, among other information.
Cowles said the early voting operations themselves were not affected and that voting was in process smoothly at all 20 sites around Orange County. Voting operations are not run through the website.
However, anyone seeking information, including where the early voting sites are located, will have to look elsewhere. Last week the office mailed out sample ballots to all registered voters, and those papers include the locations of the early voting sites. Cowles said the office was working on getting all available information up on its Facebook page.
Anyone attempting to visit the office’s domain name, ocflelections.com, is greeted by a page for Network Solutions.
“We are sorry for the inconvenience of our website being unavailable this morning. We have encountered a technical issue with our DNS server, which translates the IP address to the domain name,” Cowles reported in a statement. “Our website is still up and running and can be reached by using the IP address and not the domain name. While we are working to resolve this issue, please use https://34.232.90.38/ instead of ocfelections.com in your internet browser.”
Going directly to the IP address will require additional steps, based on the browser used.
“Our site has NOT been hacked, and there has not been any security breach; this is a technical issue, which we are working to resolve,” he added.
By about 8:40 a.m., Orange County had recorded about 700 early votes cast.
2 comments
Billy
October 19, 2020 at 10:06 am
just a glitch in their server? OVER THREE HOURS SO FAR and they cant get their website working? Makes you wonder if they are in the process of deleting all the votes for whichever candidate they dont want to win! Bill Cowels should resign immediately after he fires his entire IT department. How can anyone trust any of the results in this county if the elections website is shut down on the first day of early voting. Shame on you!
Sonja Fitch
October 19, 2020 at 4:35 pm
Dum dum dum. Is this “computer “. Bs!
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