Florida reopens voter registration after system crashed due to 'unprecedented' volume of requests
Jeffrey SchweersTALLAHASSEE – The day after Florida's voter registration system crashed due to an "unprecedented" volume of requests, Secretary of State Laurel Lee extended the deadline to 7 p.m. Tuesday so that eligible voters have the chance to register for the November election.
Lee suggested that the site was overwhelmed by requests and the crash could be related to a deliberate attempt to overload the system.
She asked state and federal law enforcement to investigate.
"We are working with local Supervisors of Elections and the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to ensure that all eligible registrants have the ability submit a voter registration application by 7:00 p.m. this evening,” Lee said. “During the last few hours, the RegisterToVoteFlorida.gov website was accessed by an unprecedented 1.1 million requests per hour.
"We will work with our state and federal law-enforcement partners to ensure this was not a deliberate act against the voting process.”
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Any applications received on the state's OVR system today will be included in the registration books for the Nov. 3 election, she said.
Any applications received today through the following channels will also be accepted:
- County Supervisors of Elections Offices
- Local Tax Collector’s Offices
- Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ Driver’s License Offices
- Paper applications postmarked by today, October 6, 2020
The glitch-plagued OVR system crashed for several hours Monday night, preventing people from registering. Several Democratic leaders and voter rights groups urged DeSantis to extend the voter registration deadline while voter groups said they were contemplating legal action.
More:On day of deadline, Florida voter registration site crashes, is down for hours
"This was a highly concerning development on the last day of voter registration in Florida," said Patricia Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters Florida. "We are looking closely at possible litigation."
Thirty-five voting advocacy groups sent DeSantis a letter this morning urging the governor to extend the registration deadline to midnight Wednesday, lengthen and publicize the technical support hotline, and have operators fluent in both English and Spanish.
People began reporting on Twitter around 4:30 p.m. Monday that they were encountering error messages when trying to log into the online system. At first, Lee said users experienced delays for a 15-minute period.
But people said they continued to have difficulties logging into the system throughout the night, right up to the midnight deadline.
This is the fourth time the system crashed since it went live three years ago. It crashed one month before the 2018 primary and a day before the before the voter registration deadline for the 2018 general election. It crashed again after the March presidential preferential primary.
During a sit-down interview with USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida in September, Lee said the elections department was doing everything it could to increase load capacity by bringing additional servers online in anticipation of a huge voter surge.
A voter registration surge is typical leading up to a presidential election. Also, the state sent out registration invitation cards cards to 2.2 million potentially eligible voters a month ago.
Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the state's only Democrat elected to statewide office, sent a letter to DeSantis and Lee this morning "highlighting yesterday’s voter registration website errors, which for hours, caused Floridians to not be able to register to vote. "
She joined others in calling on DeSantis to extend the state's voter registration deadline by at least 24 hours "due to the website’s errors which may have prevented thousands of Floridians from exercising their right to vote in the coming election."
Contact Jeff Schweers at jschweers@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @jeffschweers.
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