Florida governor Ron DeSantis today extended the state’s voter registration deadline – after unexpected and unexplained heavy traffic crashed the state’s online system and potentially prevented thousands of enrolling to cast ballots in next month’s presidential election.
DeSantis extended the deadline, which had expired yesterday, until 7 pm today. In addition to online registration, DeSantis ordered elections, motor vehicle and tax collectors offices to stay open until 7 pm local time for anyone who wants to register in person, The Associated Press writes.
Florida secretary of state Laurel Lee, who oversees the voting system, said the online registration system “was accessed by an unprecedented 1.1 million requests per hour” during the last few hours of yesterday.
Lee said in a statement earlier today that the state “will work with our state and federal law-enforcement partners to ensure this was not a deliberate act against the voting process.”
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned elections officials nationwide last week that cyberattacks could disrupt their systems during the run-up to the election.
They particularly noted “distributed denial-of-service” attacks, which inundate a computer system with requests, potentially clogging up servers until the system becomes inaccessible to legitimate users.
Here’s the Guardian’s Sam Levine with an important link:
Sam Levine
(@srl)You can register to vote in Florida here https://t.co/38ZQOfKXS6 https://t.co/nZr0OJDElD
The potential for outside meddling is an especially sensitive issue in Florida, The AP adds, a key battleground state in November’s election between Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.
The state has lingering questions about Russian hacking during the election four years ago.
Last year, state officials confirmed that election-related servers of at least two Florida counties were breached by Russian meddlers. No votes or records were tampered with.
This is not the first major computer shutdown to affect the state government this year. For weeks in the spring, tens of thousands of Floridians who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic couldn’t file for unemployment benefits because of repeated crashes by that overwhelmed computer system, delaying their payments.
DeSantis replaced the director overseeing that system but blamed the problems on his predecessor, fellow Republican Rick Scott, who is now a US senator.
A civil rights group had threatened to sue if the governor did not extend the deadline.
Meanwhile, check out Guardian reporter Kenya Evelyn’s excellent film from Florida about Black voters’ rights and opinions there this election, here.
