The site also crashed during the March primaries.
Apologies from the current company and promises that it won’t happen again left the commissioners unswayed.
“An apology after two elections is not enough,” Elba Garcia said.
Representatives from SOE Software were called to the Commissioners Court to explain why dallascountyvotes.org went down last Tuesday. The technical difficulties meant voters didn’t have access to the website’s list of voting locations and sample ballots. And the site was not displaying timely results once the polls closed, though the county did post results elsewhere on the Web.
Bill Murphy, SOE’s director of business development, said the problem in March had to do with the website’s capacity. SOE rents its servers from Amazon and didn’t have enough to handle the March primary traffic.
After the site crashed, the company rented more servers from Amazon. But during the general election last week, employees said, the company “did a bad job monitoring” its equipment and experienced another crash.
“We apologize sincerely for any inconvenience that this caused the voters of Dallas County,” Murphy said. “We are putting specific processes and procedures in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the future.
“We hope to have the opportunity to regain your trust.”
Commissioners expressed no desire to provide that opportunity. They didn’t take action Tuesday, but a majority said they wanted to look at other options.
County Administrator Darryl Martin said the contract with SOE can be nullified with 30 days’ notice.
The county staff is investigating whether the county can run the website on its own or whether other companies can provide the service.
“We’re going to figure it out soon, because we can’t allow this to happen again,” Martin said.
©2014 The Dallas Morning News
