Crashes often generate local headlines\u2014Florida and Virginia have poor track records, but there have been similar incidents in Georgia<\/a> and New York<\/a>\u2014and experts recognize the outages as part of a long-running pattern, with potentially serious consequences. Tens of thousands of voters may try and fail to sign up on the last day of registration, enough to potentially swing the results of a hotly contested race.<\/p>\n Matt Bernhard, a research engineer at the nonprofit voting technology company VotingWorks, told The Markup that the cause is often simple: A website sees increased traffic, the system buckles under the load, and voters are locked out.<\/p>\n In Pennsylvania, this year\u2019s crash was caused by a data center outage<\/a>. Florida\u2019s problems were blamed on heavy traffic and misconfigured servers. In Virginia, where there was also an outage in 2016<\/a>, it transpired that an accidentally cut fiber-optic cable was responsible for the outage<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although on election night county websites reporting results also sometimes crash, Bernhard said, \u201cIn particular, voter registration is a slightly more computationally involved thing,\u201d as it calls for processing personal information.<\/p>\n States often rely on fragile systems for public services generally, whether they build them in-house or rely on contractors. The Markup reported earlier this year that several states\u2019 unemployment websites were overwhelmed<\/a> and crashed when the pandemic struck, leaving millions of people out of work.<\/p>\n \u201cIt turns out, if you\u2019re a small government entity and then all of a sudden tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are trying to access your website and you weren\u2019t provisioned for it, it\u2019s going to go down,\u201d Bernhard said.<\/p>\n Still, additional factors are making 2020 particularly strenuous for registration systems. Voters are turning to online registration as the pandemic keeps them home, and, Snow said, in-person registration programs, which can register thousands of voters<\/a>, have been canceled for safety reasons.<\/p>\n Rules around programs like absentee and mail-in voting have also changed substantially this year<\/a> in response to the pandemic, Bernhard said, and making the registration system responsive to those new rules may also be contributing to the problem this year.<\/p>\n States have responded in different ways to this year\u2019s crashes and complaints of potential voters being shut out of registering.<\/p>\n Virginia officials said publicly<\/a> that they couldn\u2019t unilaterally extend registration under the law but said they\u2019d support an order from a court to keep registration open. Snow\u2019s group obliged and filed a lawsuit against the state of Virginia to allow registration to continue for another two days past the deadline. Judge John A. Gibney of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the group\u2019s request<\/a>.<\/p>\n In Florida, the state government issued an extension of less than a day<\/a>, despite civil rights groups filing suit to extend it for two. Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida said the state had \u201cfailed its citizens\u201d and predicted \u201cmayhem\u201d<\/a> come election day but rejected the legal challenge as likely to create further chaos.<\/p>\n Mark Ard, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of State, said in an emailed statement that \u201can unprecedented 1.1 million requests per hour\u201d had taxed the registration site but that officials haven\u2019t tied the traffic \u201cto any one factor or source.\u201d (There was speculation<\/a> that an encouraging get-out-the-vote tweet from Ariana Grande may have contributed to the traffic spike, but officials said misconfigured servers made the system especially prone to failure.)<\/p>\n Daniel Egan, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Office of Administration, said in a statement to The Markup that, following the outage on a Saturday evening, all services were restored by early Monday morning. \u201cThere is no evidence of loss of data or malicious activity associated with the outage,\u201d he said in the statement. \u201cVoter registration forms were available for download throughout the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n The window to register wasn\u2019t extended and closed two weeks after the incident.<\/p>\n As the states were quick to point out, there\u2019s no evidence that this year\u2019s outages were caused intentionally, but the incidents point to serious vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n \u201cIf our own voters can tip over our voting systems, could you imagine what a coordinated [distributed denial-of-service] attack or something like that could do?\u201d Bernhard asks.<\/p>\n To remedy the issue, states will have to make long-term investments in their registration systems. Some cash is already going to those projects. The National Conference of State Legislatures notes that some states have tapped into money dispersed from the 2002 Help America Vote Act<\/a>, while others have leaned on their own budgets. Some states have appropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions<\/a>, to build systems.<\/p>\n But when crashes do happen, organizations like Snow\u2019s act retroactively, filing emergency lawsuits after a shutdown and hoping that a judge agrees to extend the deadline. Even when deadlines are extended, though, a number of people are likely locked out of participation.<\/p>\n Florida, for example, approved an amendment that would allow people with a felony record to vote in this election, Snow said, but confusion around mandatory fines and fees<\/a> left many of those voters struggling to register until the end of the deadline. That may have been one speed bump too many for some.<\/p>\n Other voters who tried and failed to register may not even hear about an extension when it happens. States, he said, need to take responsibility for the known weaknesses in their registration systems.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re not maintaining critical infrastructure and it results in people not being able to vote,\u201d Snow said, \u201cthat\u2019s voter suppression by inaction.\u201d<\/p>\n This article was originally published on The Markup<\/a> by Colin Lecher and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nWhat\u2019s going on?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
States say crashes weren\u2019t \u201cmalicious\u201d <\/strong><\/h2>\n
Calls for improving the system<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n![\"Originally](\"https:\/\/mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org\/static\/img\/republish-logo.png\"){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/p>\n