Severed cable takes Virginia’s state websites offline day before voter registration ends
A technical issue took Virginia state websites down at a critical time
Virginia state officials say that a severed cable is to blame for state websites going offline on the deadline day for voter registration, according to Virginia’s WUSA-9 News.
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“Due to a network outage, the Citizen Portal is temporarily unavailable. We are working with our network providers to restore service as quickly as possible,” the Virginia Department of Elections said via Twitter.
Though voters can still register at the DMV and via their local registrar, Virginia’s Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax is calling for the registration deadline to be extended. He tweeted that he was working with the administration to make sure that the state’s citizens had full access to voting despite the outage.
Though a spokesperson in Virginia governor Ralph Northam‘s office said the interruption would likely be temporary, the websites were still down at 1:30 p.m. Not only does the outage impact voter registration, but it also impacts some counties already processing early voting ballots and others who are still sending out absentee ballots, according to the Washington Post.
In 2016, the state of Virginia was sued when voting registration sites crashed just before the deadline. This current disruption may mean that option will be exercised once more, according to the Post.
“Election officials in Virginia have again failed the public,” Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement obtained by the Post. The organization successfully filed suit in 2016, resulting in Virginia extending its voter registration deadline. “It is astonishing that Virginia has not learned from failures of the not-so-distant past.”
However, with just 13 electoral votes up for grabs in the general election, Virginia is not considered as important a state to presidential victory as it once was. The state, according to an analysis last month in the Post, was once solidly Republican. But now, it’s considered a win for Democrats due to both demographics and an increase in population in the state’s more liberal northern suburbs.
Neither candidate has done much on-the-ground campaigning there this year although Virginians have turned out in high numbers in early voting well before today’s computer shutdown. But given the lessening impact of the state, it may not have a significant impact on the race. Virginia is the only southern state Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and it didn’t stop him from victory.
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“I think [Trump] can still win the presidential election,” Tucker Martin, a political consultant, told the Post last month. “But I don’t think Virginia will be part of their path to victory, and it doesn’t have to be.”
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