Monroe County's elections office unveiled a new, consolidated elections website this week as part of an effort to improve reliability, transparency and voter access. Supervisor of Elections Sherri Hodies announced that the county has moved its site to votemonroeflkeys.gov, migrating away from the statewide VR Systems host to an Azure-hosted platform developed with Iowa Computer Gurus.

The redesign comes after traffic surges during the 2024 election cycle caused outages across many Florida county sites, leaving voters without timely access to registration checks, polling location information and candidate details. County officials framed the move to a cloud-hosted platform as a response to those capacity and availability problems and a step toward smoother online service during high-demand periods.

The new site consolidates multiple voter services into a single portal, bringing together voter registration checks, polling place lookups, candidate information, campaign finance records and a newsletter sign-up. Legacy content on keyselections.org will continue to redirect visitors to the new address through March 2027, but residents are being urged to update bookmarks and any links they rely on to the new votemonroeflkeys.gov address.

Locally, election staff pointed to Marathon’s Nov. 4 city election as an early test of the office’s improved processes, noting that those results posted smoothly. The office has also expanded its outreach, launching new Facebook and Instagram channels and committing to monthly email updates as part of a broader push to boost transparency and trust in the electoral process.

For Monroe County voters, the changes are intended to reduce friction on Election Day and in the lead-up to elections. A consolidated, cloud-hosted site can scale more readily during peak traffic, making routine tasks such as verifying registration status or finding a polling place less likely to be interrupted. The outreach measures seek to connect more residents with authoritative information directly from the Supervisor of Elections rather than through secondary sources.

The move also fits into a wider state and national conversation about election infrastructure, vendor relationships and resilience. Cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure are commonly used to provide greater capacity and geographic redundancy, while counties weigh vendor choices against concerns about security, accessibility and cost. The county's decision to work with Iowa Computer Gurus to build the new site reflects a local choice of technical partner to implement that approach.

Monroe County residents should update bookmarks and follow the elections office on its new social channels to stay informed about registration deadlines, polling locations and election results. The extended redirect period from keyselections.org ensures a transition window, but the office is encouraging habitual use of the new votemonroeflkeys.gov portal going forward.