JACKSONVILLE, Fla — Click here to register to vote online.
Florida's Secretary of State announced the deadline to register to vote in Florida will be extended to 7 p.m. Tuesday following a slew of website malfunctions leading up to the prior Monday night deadline.
State voting rights groups and officials called for a deadline extension after the state website used to sign up potential voters in Florida were inaccessible for many of the hours leading up to the deadline to register.
Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee tweeted just before 6 p.m. Monday that the website was "online and working" following 15 minutes of delays.
But in the hours following that tweet, users continued to report issues with accessing the site. First Coast News was not able to access the website as late as 11:52 p.m.
Secretary Lee's office released the following statement from Lee on Tuesday evening:
"The Florida Department of State has been in touch with state and federal law enforcement partners since yesterday to discuss the issues that affected Florida's Online Voter Registration system on Monday, October 5, 2020. At this time, we have not identified any evidence of interference or malicious activity impacting the site. We will continue to monitor the situation and provide any additional information as it develops."
Following that statement, Lee's office said the deadline will be extended, saying there was a surge of access attempts Monday night.
“During the last few hours, the RegisterToVoteFlorida.gov website was accessed by an unprecedented 1.1 million requests per hour. We will work with our state and federal law-enforcement partners to ensure this was not a deliberate act against the voting process," Lee wrote.
Along with extending the deadline to register online, registering in-person at local voting registration sites will also be extended until 7 p.m., Lee said. Registration documents can also be mailed, as long as they are postmarked for Tuesday.
Patricia Brigham, President of League of Women Voters Florida, said the new deadline did not help potential voters who were at work or school.
"The announcement came just hours before the new deadline," Brigham said. "We would have liked to see the expansion last until 11:59 p.m. on October 7th."
Meanwhile, voting rights advocates are saying concerns about the website have been brought to the Secretary of State ahead of the deadline.
All Voting Is Local, along with 34 other groups, released a statement calling on the Governor extend the deadline two days.
"Our OVR system had problems shortly before the book closing deadline for the August primary in 2018, when voters were unable to register due to an error in the coding of the site, and again in the lead up to the book closing deadline for the November election where many problems were reported," the advocate groups wrote in a letter. "There were again reports of the online registration site having problems in late March of this year, at a time where there was not a surge in usage."
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried also weighed in Tuesday, saying problems with the website have been known on the state level.
"This wasn't something that hasn't happened before. We saw the problems with the unemployment site, we've seen the problems with the voter registration site, this should have been a priority of this administration," Fried said. "We know the site has gone down in times before, in 2018, and then also during the presidential primaries."
The state is looking into whether the capacity overload was deliberate. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, voting rights advocates are pushing for changes to the website.
"We strongly encourage the state to take a good, hard look at the kinks in the system so that this does not continue to happen in election cycles," Brigham said.