Election Vendor VR Systems Takes Florida County Elections Sites' Voter Lookup Tools Offline Over the PHP Flaws During Early Voting

On Wednesday, Oct. 21, during early voting, VR Systems took down public lookup tools on the county Supervisor of Elections websites it hosts across Florida. Suncoast Searchlight reported that the Tallahassee elections technology firm “pulled some public-facing parts of its websites after the PHP Foundation” disclosed critical PHP flaws (2026-10-21–cisa-alert-urges-immediate-patching-of-php2shell-php-flaws). VR Systems’ chief operations officer, Ben Martin, said the company “took down the service at 10 a.m. Wednesday in response to warnings by the PHP programmers.” In the report he points to the PHP programmers, not to CISA or the MS-ISAC. He said “this does not affect the ability to vote, only the ability to look up information,” and “This does not affect the voter rolls.”

On Sarasota County’s elections site, “voters cannot look at sample ballots or find voting locations.” The county office’s spokesperson wrote: “I do not currently have a resolution time from the vendor.” The Florida Department of State’s own voter registration tool “appears to still be active.” Suncoast Searchlight’s update says service came back “around 7 p.m.” after “an outage that began at 10 a.m.” The report describes the vendor taking its own tools down and reports no compromise.