Are you registered to vote? Are you sure? Did you update your address when you moved last year? Do you know your new polling place?
Want to know who’s running for office — and who’s funding their campaigns?
Is your ballot coming in the mail? (Not if you haven’t renewed your request, as those now expire after every election.)
All this information and more is available on the Monroe County elections website, which has a new look, a new online address — and a new web hosting company.
“We are no longer being hosted by VR Systems,” Supervisor of Elections Sherri Hodies said on Nov. 4, referring to the Tallahassee-based company that, until this year, had hosted 64 out of 67 Florida counties’ elections websites. In 2024, as millions of users visited 64 county websites to check election results, the digital demand overwhelmed the hosting platform, and dozens of counties fielded frantic calls from candidates and voters as online results weren’t updating and websites were crashing, forcing users to find election results elsewhere.
“So instead of using the same hosting company that everyone does, we spread out the traffic,” Hodies said. “We worked with Iowa Computer Gurus to redesign the website, which took about three months, and it’s hosted by Azure, so we shouldn’t have any freeze-ups or blackouts. And the ones that happened last year weren’t the fault of my predecessor or anyone here.”
Hodies added that while the website upgrade was her priority, the new web address — votemonroeflkeys.gov — was not.
“The state made a rule years ago that all election websites had to end in .gov,” Hodies said. “But our site had never been updated for that requirement.”
So the former keyselections.org is now votemonroeflkeys.gov. The old address will automatically redirect users to the correct one until March 2027, Hodies said, but encouraged users to update their bookmarks and saved sites.
The new site went live on Oct. 6 and launched “without a hiccup,” she said, hoping for the same smooth operation for Marathon’s city council elections on Nov. 4.
“Those election results for Marathon will be the test,” she said the day before the election. As of 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 5, the Marathon results were posted on the site’s home page.
“Transparency and trust have been folded into this website and into our new social media series, ‘Election Connection’ and ‘Behind the Ballot,’” Hodies writes in a letter to voters on the website’s home page.
“For the first time ever, the Monroe County Supervisor of Elections office is on Facebook and Instagram, and I’ll be launching a monthly newsletter later this month,” she said, adding that people can opt in to receive the newsletter via email on the elections website. Hodies credited the county’s election employees for their experience, knowledge and commitment to ensuring clean and accurate elections in Monroe County.
“I’m surrounded by amazing people, and I’ve been attending training and education sessions around the state,” she said.
