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•🧑💼 Who: Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Office, Paul Lux, Shianna Youngblood
•📜 What: Election website glitch, ballot misprint issues, upcoming elections
•📅 When: March 11, 2025, with another election on April 1, 2025
•📍 Where: Okaloosa County, including Niceville, Fort Walton Beach, and Laurel Hill
•❓ Why: A caching error caused early test result postings, and a new security feature led to some ballots being unreadable
It’s been a busy couple of months for the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Office.
The office will have participated in five election days between November 5, 2024, and June 10, 2025.
By contrast, the Supervisor ran one election in 2023 and three in 2022.
“This has not been my favorite election to date,” Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux said over the phone before election day ended.
So, the fast pace has meant some issues – that have reared their ugly head on municipal election day, 2025.
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If you love the Okaloosa Supervisor of Elections Office website layout and visit it regularly (or are a journalist preparing for election night in Okaloosa County), you would have noticed that the website posted election results for the March 11 municipal elections.
That’s not allowed – just so we’re clear.
The Okaloosa Supervisor of Elections can’t post any results until 7 pm central time on the night of the election.
So why were there results posted?
“Somehow, and I’m getting tired of saying that somehow because some things are beyond my control, but somehow, our logic and accuracy test data that we did not publish was put on a page that was publicly accessible,” Lux said.
According to Lux, the numbers were test data that somehow leaked onto the live website through a cached page, but the Supervisors of Elections’ employees never published it.
“We never published the page, and I verified this morning at 530 standing behind Shianna [Youngblood, an SoE Employee responsible for website maintenance], and when she opened our console, she showed me that, ‘Look, here’s where I uploaded the results, here’s where I zeroed them out. There’s nothing there.’ So we followed the link, and sure enough, [the data] was still there. So, it’s clearly working from a cached copy of the data,” Lux said.
The cached info making it onto the live site meant that the page started to show fake election results on the website from an earlier test to ensure the accuracy of the process, which sent social media into a scurry about the early release of results.
Lux says they are in the process of getting rid of the vendor they believe is at fault for the issue – but this is confirmation that they gotta go.
“If I could stop running elections for a hot minute, I could move on with replacing my website with another web vendor. But unfortunately, I can’t do that until after June,” Lux ruefully mused.
Typically, added security is a good thing in elections. After all, ‘election integrity’ is a buzzword (phrase?) now.
So when a new security feature on Okaloosa’s voting machines allowed for the printing of ‘VBM’ for ‘Vote by Mail’ on the ballot, Supervisor Lux was happy. “What stops people from smuggling in vote-by-mail ballots and sticking them in machines in the polling place?” Lux asked rhetorically, “And the answer is, we now have a box in the upper left-hand corner that we pre-print the letters VBM inside that box when we mail a ballot to a voter so that they can’t that VBM printed in that box means that that machine on election day or on or in an early voting site absolutely will not read the ballot if that if VBM is printed in that box, or anything is printed in that box, It just literally won’t let the ballot be read.”
Well, that added feature printed on about 25 ballots on Niceville Election Day morning, meaning the tabulation machines could not read the ballots. The same thing happened for voters in Fort Walton Beach and Laurel Hill. “What we’ve learned this morning is it for darn sure works,” Lux said, “You know, somehow, through the cracks, the vote-by-mail artwork ended up getting loaded into the precinct machines.”
Lux added that the pace of elections in the last couple of months has meant the Supervisor’s office has had much more work preparing.
The ballots counted during the window of time when VBM ballots were printed haven’t been tabulated yet but will be counted by the canvassing board before they leave for the evening and will be included in the totals.
That matters in an election, in Niceville, where 25 ballots constitute about 10 percent of the total votes (as of noon on March 10).
The hits keep coming for the Okaloosa Supervisor of Elections. After Tuesday’s election, the office will hold another election on April 1 – to replace Matt Gaetz in the United States Congress and to replace Dr. Joel Rudman in the Florida House.
RELATED: Matt Gaetz resigned. Now what?
All eligible voters in Okaloosa County can vote for Gaetz’s replace on April 1. Only registered Republicans in the northern reaches of Okaloosa County will be eligible to vote on Rudman’s replacement.
