Throughout the night last night, election returns showed a remarkably close race in Virginia. A testament to Ed Gillespie and his team, people throughout the Commonwealth, particularly politicos and political junkies, tried following the election returns as best they could.
The problem?
They couldn’t.
In another embarrassment on Election Day, Virginia State Board of Election’s last night simply shut down. Not able to handle the demands of traffic (in 2014!!) for a middling (in national importance) Senate race, with only two other somewhat contested races, the servers at Virginia SBE were unable to account for an expected and foreseeable influx of web traffic.
Given that Virginia SBE should be a primary resource for news and election returns, this led to some consideration frustration.
the new version of the Virginia SBE website is not having a good night.
— Dan Schutte (@schuttedan) November 5, 2014
Can somebody from the Virginia SBE please call tech support? Not like the state is holding an election or anything.
— Donald Luzzatto (@donaldluzzatto) November 5, 2014
The Virginia SBE site is chugging and not returning any results. Wish they could get it together. This is second elex in a row.
— Jon Davenport (@JonDavenport1) November 5, 2014
The Virginia State Board of Elections website is totally busted. Media gets their results from SBE CSV dumps too, so it will be a while.
— Taber Andrew Bain (@taber) November 5, 2014
Virginia SBE website is down. Get it together folks.
— Jason Samuel (@Jason_Samuel) November 5, 2014
And at one point, things got so embarrassingly bad (like Apple telling people not to use their Maps app, and download Google Maps instead BAD):
SBE now @vaELECT is redirecting viewers to Politico and @vpapupdates
— Vivian J. Paige (@vpaige) November 5, 2014
Problem is, third party (and amazing organization) VPAP gets their updates and information from Virginia SBE as well. So shifting people over to VPAP puts the blame on them, rather than SBE.
Waiting next SBE update. Supposed to be every 10 minutes; going on 22 minutes since last update
— vpapupdates (@vpapupdates) November 5, 2014
At one point, things got so delayed that it was nearly one hour before results on SBE & VPAP were updated last night, at 9 PM on a Tuesday, again, with a predictable increase in traffic.
[UPDATED 4:31 PM]
Bearing Drift received some new information regarding the outage, caused by Virginia SBE’s new third party site. After SBE’s third party site and problems, Northrop Grumman stepped in with a new server to get SBE back up online, leading to the resolution of the problems this morning. Without NG’s assistance, SBE would likely still be down.
We’ve removed an earlier comment referencing Virginia’s VITA contract with Northrop Grumman, as the outage was not associated with that contract, or NG. – D.J. Spiker
Clearly that wasn’t the case in 2014. And heaven help us trying to navigate SBE with election night in a swing state with an open presidency in 2016.
But don’t worry. Because at 8:21 AM the day AFTER the election, the problem’s fixed!
Our results page server issues have been resolved. Updated and detailed #VAelection2014 results available at http://t.co/P7hfMhzr4H
— VA Dept of Elections (@vaELECT) November 5, 2014
