Deadline to register to vote extended
Officials probe if website disruption was ‘deliberate’
Florida election officials haven’t detected any evidence to suggest a cyberattack contributed to an “unprecedented” surge in online traffic that overwhelmed the state’s voter registration website on the final day to sign up, Secretary of State Laurel Lee said Tuesday night.
About 1.1 million requests per hour inundated the website in the hours leading up to the 11:59 p.m. Monday deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 3 presidential election, election officials said.
That volume of traffic in a state with roughly 14 million registered voters spurred suspicions and led election officials to contact law enforcement. Officials haven’t explained exactly what caused the website’s problems, but
they don’t think malicious activity was involved.
“At this time, wehave not identified any evidence of interference or malicious activity impacting the site,” Lee said. “We will continue to monitor the situation and provide any additional information as it develops.”
Lee called the heavy website traffic “unprecedented” and said she worked with federal and state law enforcement to ensure it wasn’t “a deliberate act against the voting process.” The website periodically crashed Monday night, leaving users frustrated with error messages and glitches and unable to sign up to vote.
State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Republican from St. Petersburg, said he thinks the public deserves a detailed explanation of what happened Monday night. Hewas puzzled that the website was receiving 1.1 million requests per hour, given the number of registered voters on the state’s rolls.
“There is something fishy there,” he said earlier on Tuesday.
As a result of the website’s problems, the state extended the registration deadline from 11:59 p.m. Monday to 7 p.m. Tuesday, providing the state’s residents with more time to register.
A coalition of progressive groups is seeking more time on the grounds residents didn’t have enough notice of the change. Those groups filed a federal lawsuit that requests a two-day extension to the deadline.
Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince, who leads the company that protects Florida’s elections website, tweeted that he had seen no indications of a cyberattack.
Problems started about 5 p.m. Monday and continued up until the midnight deadline.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has not opened an investigation into the disruption, said Jessica Cary, an agency spokeswoman. The FBI declined to comment, citing agency policy not to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.
Gov. Ron DeSantis attributed the outages to a “bottleneck” caused by heavy traffic ahead of the deadline.
“You can have the best site in the world, but sometimes there are hiccups on it,” he said.
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned elections officials nationwide lastweek of “denial-of-service” attacks, which seek to clog up websites by inundating them with requests.
The volume of requests that overwhelmed the Florida registration site Monda ywas not consistent with denial-of-service attacks, which typically render websites unavailable with barrages of several hundred million requests per second, The Associated Press reported.
The disruption left Floridians who waited until the last minute to register to vote facing barriers and challenges.
John Hilton, a resident of Longwood in Central Florida, said he tried more than 25 times for over an hour Monday evening before he was finally able to log in and register.
“It was an unfortunate and frustrating experience last evening, and I’m sure many gave up out of frustration,” Hilton said.
A coalition of groups that included the Dream Defenders, New Florida Majority, Organize Florida and the Florida Immigrant Coalition sued DeSantis and Lee. One of the plaintiffs is Augusta Sandino Christian Namphy, a Broward County resident who the suit says tried unsuccessfully to register to vote for the first time Monday night.
Patricia Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, said her group worked as hard as it could to inform people of the extension, but she worried that people might have missed the news.
“This is not the first time there have been website issues,” she said. “It was not completely unsurprising since it happened before. I do know they were cautioned that this was going to be an enormous turnout and to be prepared for an overload.”
Officials extended the hours of county supervisors of elections offices, tax collectors’ offices and state driver’s license offices for people to register in person. Registrations postmarked on Tuesday also will be accepted and added to the rolls for the Nov. 3 election, officials said.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden praised the state’s decision to extend the deadline, calling it a “win for our democracy.”
Republicans and Democrats scrambled to sign up voters leading up to the deadline. Biden and President Donald Trump are running neck-to-neck in the contest for Florida’s 29 electoral votes.
As of the end of August, Florida had nearly 14.1 million registered voters. About 5.2 million are Democrats, 5 million are Republicans, 3.7 million have no party affiliation and about 188,500 belong to other parties.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz slammed DeSantis in a statement, saying he didn’t do enough to fix the issue.
“A last-minute window of seven more hours is a confusing fix that many voters will never hear about in time,” she said. “A governor known for voter suppression should always err on the side of generous voter accommodation when he screws up like this.”
Twelve other Democratic members of Florida’s congressional delegation joined in calling for an additional extension.
State Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-Miami, said the state has failed to provide adequate websites for its citizens to access vital services.
A surge of claims during the coronavirus lockdown caused widespread problems with Florida’s unemployment website.
“I believe it’s more likely we have another jalopy versus something nefarious,” he said.