Voter registration back up in Virginia after residents couldn’t sign up on final day
UPDATE: A federal judge on Wednesday extended the voter registration deadline, NPR reports. Virginia residents now have until 11:59 p.m. Thursday to register in person or online.
An outage Tuesday prevented Virginia residents from registering to vote for hours on the last day available to do so in the state.
“Due to a network outage the Citizen Portal is temporarily unavailable,” the Virginia Department of Elections website said for much of the day. “We are working with our network providers to restore service as quickly as possible.”
The agency tweeted just before 9:50 a.m. that a “fiber cut” near the Commonwealth Enterprise Solutions Center caused the outage and that technicians were working on repairs.
Just before 3:30 p.m., the agency tweeted that the portal is back up and residents could use it to register.
Oct. 13 is the last day Virginia residents can register to vote ahead of the Nov. 3 election, but some have called for an extension given the glitch.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax tweeted that he is pushing for a deadline extension.
“We will work with the Administration to resolve this issue and ensure all voters have access to #Vote,” Fairfax tweeted Tuesday.
Gov. Ralph Northam said during a press conference that he supports extending the deadline but that it will be up to the courts to do so, the Associated Press reports.
U.S. Reps. Don Beyer, Gerry Connolly and Jennifer Wexton, all Virginia Democrats, released a joint statement calling for a court order to extend the deadline.
“The shutdown of Virginia’s online voter registration threatens to prevent many Virginians from casting their ballots in the 2020 election,” the statement says. “Three weeks before the election, nearly one million Virginians have already voted, which speaks to the importance voters across the Commonwealth attach to participating in this election. They must be given every opportunity to do so.”
This isn’t the first time an outage has affected voter registration in Virginia.
In 2016, the portal crashed on the last day to register due to a computer glitch, and a judge extended the deadline following a lawsuit, CBS News reports.
“Election officials in Virginia have again failed the public,” Kristen Clarke — president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed the suit in 2016 — said in a statement Tuesday. “The state’s online voter registration portal has crashed on the eve of the registration deadline, leaving thousands of eligible people in the dark.”
Clarke called Tuesday’s outage “particularly astounding” given the same thing happened at “virtually the same time in 2016.”
“We sued the state and secured an extension of the registration deadline allowing tens of thousands of voters the ability to register and vote. It is astonishing that Virginia has not learned from failures of the not-so-distant past,” the statement says.
The outage also affected in-person early voting across the state.
The county of Albemarle tweeted that voters weren’t able to be checked in and “will only be able to vote a provisional ballot.”
Virginia Beach reported the same.
Provisional ballots are offered to voters when there are questions about their eligibility.
“In nearly all of the states, after being cast, the provisional ballot is kept separate from other ballots until after the election,” the National Conference of State Legislatures says. “A determination is then made as to whether the voter was eligible to vote, and therefore whether the ballot is to be counted.”
Virginia has traditionally been a swing state but generally isn’t considered a battleground in this election — with polling showing Democratic nominee Joe Biden comfortably ahead of President Donald Trump in the state, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. The state has voted Democratic in presidential elections since it last opted for a Republican in 2004.
Other Virginia agencies were also experiencing outages Tuesday, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Employment Commission.
This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 10:41 AM with the headline "Voter registration back up in Virginia after residents couldn’t sign up on final day."
