The secretary of state’s Web site has been in various stages of not working right — and sometimes not working at all — for several days now.
On Tuesday, I noticed that the campaign reporting and disclosure databases were down. By Wednesday, the entire Web site had slowed to a snail’s pace.
This morning, the site was running more smoothly, but the searchable databases were still offline. Tonight, the entire secretary of state’s Web site — http://www.sos.state.nm.us — is offline.
I’m not the only person who has noticed it. Santa Fe New Mexican reporter Steve Terrell noted the problems today on his blog.
So what’s up? I asked A.J. Salazar, Secretary of State Mary Herrera’s elections director, earlier today. Here’s how he replied in an e-mail:
“Our networks are currently down for maintenance and security,” he wrote.
I asked for more detail, including how long the Web site will be down.
“We are addressing issues as revealed and recommended through the security assessment. We are proceeding with this course of action until the issues are fully addressed,” he wrote. “We are working toward this end and will bring all systems up when we are complete.”
Remember the new database I saw last week?
Salazar first told me about the “security assessment” earlier this week. I had been directed by a source to the project to improve the Web site’s campaign reporting and disclosure database. The site was unpublicized but accessible to the public, if you had the Web address.
I was eager to see the under-construction and long-delayed project, and as I perused it a week ago I was impressed. But on Sunday, that page on the secretary of state’s Web site went down. Salazar told me Monday that the under-construction project was taken offline because the office was going through the security assessment of its entire Web site. At the time, he said nothing about the old database or the rest of the secretary of state’s Web site also being taken offline.
At any rate, Salazar did tell me that the department of information technology was requiring the security assessment, which hadn’t been done in the secretary of state’s office in recent memory. With candidates and others being able to input information about their campaign activity into the site’s database, he said the assessment was important to make sure the data could not be manipulated.
Salazar told me Monday that he hoped the new site would be ready for testing sometime this summer and ready to go live later this summer or at least before the next candidate reporting deadline in October.
But now, only three days later, Salazar isn’t even predicting when the old system or the rest of the office’s Web site will be back up, saying only that the office is working to address “issues” revealed during the “security assessment” and will “bring all systems up when we are complete.”
Hmm…