Early Tuesday morning, Virginia’s entire voter registration system went down after a fiber cut “impacted data circuits and VPN connectivity for multiple agencies,” according to a tweet from the Virginia Department of Elections. Tuesday marks the last day to register to vote in the state.
While the system was back up and running by Tuesday afternoon, the outage has left many voters in the state panicked and uncertain whether their votes will be counted. The Virginia Department of Election’s tweet about the outage was flooded with hundreds of replies, including some asking for extensions. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has yet to comment on whether an extension is possible. (Northam, it was revealed today, was brought up as a potential target by the same militia group accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.)
Virginia’s outage follows Florida’s voter registration website crashing Monday a few hours before the state’s midnight deadline. After receiving more than a million requests per hour, the New York Times reported, the deadline was extended to 7 p.m. the following day. Governor Ron DeSantis called it “an inordinate amount of traffic,” which had created a “bottleneck” effect. And crashed registration systems are not the only thing keeping voters on edge—images of prohibitively long lines in Georgia and reports of broken voting machines have raised concerns about voter suppression.
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