A damaged web cable took down Virginia’s voter registration web site hours earlier than the deadline

Tubes for fiber optic cables. Unintentionally severed fiber optic cables have taken down Viriginia’s voter registration web site. | Jens Büttner/image alliance through Getty Photographs

One other state’s voter registration web site has technical difficulties.

Open Sourced logo

In what’s quick changing into a sample for voter registration within the 2020 presidential election, technical difficulties have befallen one other state’s voter registration web site on the final day residents can register. This time, Virginians are locked out of the power to register on-line.

As of publication time, Virginians hoping to register through the location’s internet portal should discover one other means to take action earlier than Tuesday’s 11:59 pm deadline, as the location says it’s “briefly unavailable” attributable to a “community outage” that might not have come at a worse time. Guests to the web site at present get an error message saying it’s briefly unavailable however service might be restored “as rapidly as doable.”

Screenshot of error message on Virginia’s voter registration website

The issue, in keeping with the state’s Data Expertise Company, is {that a} fiber optic cable offering web to the state’s Enterprise Options Middle was someway reduce, taking the voter registration website down with it.

“A crew working in a single day on a roadside utilities mission severed fiber cables,” Krys Grondorf of Verizon instructed Recode. “It was not a Verizon crew that severed the cable — it was a county roadside utilities mission.”

“This has affected the Division’s citizen portal together with native registrar’s workplaces throughout the Commonwealth,” Andrea Gaines of the Virginia Division of Elections instructed Recode. “Verizon technicians are on website and dealing to restore the reduce; updates might be supplied as work progresses.”

Gaines didn’t reply to questions on how the cable was reduce, how lengthy the outage is anticipated to final, or what treatments the state will present to make up for the misplaced time.

Potential voters can nonetheless register Tuesday by printing out a voter registration kind and dropping it off at a voter registration workplace in particular person or by mailing it (make certain it’s postmarked October 13).

Final week, Florida’s voter registration web site crashed within the ultimate hours of registration. Whereas the Florida secretary of state initially stated the outage was transient, it turned out to final for a number of hours, probably stopping tens of hundreds of registrations. The state ended up extending registration for seven hours the following day, albeit in the course of the day and with little discover.

Open Sourced is made doable by Omidyar Community. All Open Sourced content material is editorially impartial and produced by our journalists.


Will you assist maintain Vox free for all?

The US is in the course of one of the consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s important that each one People are in a position to entry clear, concise data on what the end result of the election may imply for his or her lives, and the lives of their households and communities. That’s our mission at Vox. However our distinctive model of explanatory journalism takes assets. Even when the economic system and the information promoting market recovers, your assist might be a vital a part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. When you have already contributed, thanks. For those who haven’t, please take into account serving to everybody perceive this presidential election: Contribute immediately from as little as $3.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *