Voter registration in Virginia will resume immediately and continue until midnight Friday, a federal judge ordered Thursday.
Judge Claude Hilton of U.S. District Court in Alexandria decided to extend registration after the state elections website crashed on Monday, the last day for Virginians to get on the rolls.
A civil rights group sued on behalf of Kathy and Michael Kern, a Charlottesville couple who tried and failed multiple times Sunday and Monday to register. Two nonprofit groups involved in voter-registration drives – New Virginia Majority Education Fund and Virginia Civic Engagement Table – also are plaintiffs.
“Thousands if not tens of thousands of people” tried and failed to vote, their attorney, John A. Freedman, said in court Thursday.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, supported the lawsuit, saying residents should get more time to register.
The plantiffs and the state government agreed that voting should be allowed until 11:59 pm on Monday, October 24, 2016, to account for both the two days of outages and any similar problems in the next few days, as well as the time it will take to notify voters of the extension.
But Hilton deemed that extension would be too lengthy.
“I think you’re entitled to some relief,” Hilton said, but added, “I believe that you’re asking for too much time.” An extension through Friday night, he said, “more than makes up for” the two days of major technical failures.
An attorney representing Attorney General Mark Herring argued that four days would provide “a safety net” in the event of future crashes. She also said it would be impossible to contact the people who tried to register online and failed, because their information was never recorded by the online system.
“If the system crashes again, we’ll address that,” Hilton said. “I don’t think we should presume that the system’s going to crash.”
He noted that voters can also register in person or by mail-in paper form through Friday should problems with the website recur.
“A longer extension would have been great,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the group that brought the suit. But she called the decision “a victory for those who wanted to register and didn’t have the opportunity to do so.”
Trouble with the registration system began Sunday, after Facebook and Google alerted Virginians to the state’s looming registration deadline. On its Facebook page, the Department of Elections said Monday that “an unprecedented activity level” had left the registration website slow and in some cases “completely unresponsive.”
Problems escalated on Monday. From 3:40 p.m. on, both parties agreed, the website was completely unresponsive. Voting closed at 11:59 p.m. Monday night.
Neither the governor nor the attorney general has the power to extend voter registration; only a judge can do so.
Republican leaders in the GOP-controlled General Assembly called on McAuliffe to shake up the leadership at the state elections department, noting that the agency failed to heed warnings from local officials about problems they were encountering with the registration system prior to Monday’s crash.
“It is clear that local election registrars and the General Assembly have lost confidence in the Department of Elections and its ability to provide the necessary technical and support services,’ said a statement from House Speaker William Howell, Majority Leader Kirk Cox and the rest of the Republican leadership.
“Governor McAuliffe should consider a leadership change at the Department after the November elections,” they said in the statement, adding that the legislature should review the situation when it convenes in January.
Since the last presidential election, Virginia has rolled out a system that allows citizens to register to vote and update their registrations online. Four years ago, the state had an entirely paper-based system.
The shift to online was hailed as a more modern and efficient approach, but registrars have complained in recent months about recurring glitches and severe slowdowns. Six days before the deadline, election officiails brought an additional server online in an unsuccessful attempt to deal with increasing visitors.
The state launched its online voter registration system in 2013. Until this year, the largest number of registrations submitted in a single day was about 2,200, Cortés said. That single-day online registration record has been broken three times this year in response to social-media campaigns urging Virginians to register: 8,000 signed up one day in February, ahead of the deadline to register for the primary; 17,000 on Sept. 23, ahead of National Voter Registration Day; 21,000 managed to do so on Monday, despite the day’s technical issues.
Featured Image: AP
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Rachel Weiner
