Contra Costa County's elections website was down Tuesday due to a problem with a web hosting company that is affecting a number of counties nationwide.
The website was down for more than three hours until about 1:05 p.m. when Contra Costa County's website appeared to be functioning, along with the websites of two other affected governments, Ventura and Shasta County.
Assistant Registrar Scott Konopasek said that software vendor SOE Software, which the county has worked with for the past seven years, had initially thought bandwidth or capacity issues might be responsible for the breakdown.
Konopasek said the outage would not affect the county's ability to count and process votes, but has made it harder for voters to look up information, including the locations of their police places.
"It's a customer service issue," Konopasek said.
A representative from SOE, Maureen Szlemp, told the Investigative Unit they were aware of intermittent outages at the three California counties. The problem was due to much higher traffic volumes than they had anticipated, Szlemp said.
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"We are in the process of redistributing the loads to different servers," she said.
Other county websites that utilize SOE software include Sacramento County, Santa Clara County and Los Angeles County. Those websites apparently continued function without any issues.
Elections officials are cross-posting polling locations and other election information to the county's main web site at. They will do the same with election results if the problem persists past 8 p.m. when the polls close. More information is also at the state's elections website.
Bay City News contributed to this report.
