Florida extends voter registration after website crash
Floridians experienced issues with Floridaโs voter registration website, starting about 5 p.m. Monday -- just hours before the midnight deadline established by law. Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee, who oversees the voting system, said the online registration system โwas accessed by an unprecedented 1.1 million requests per hourโ at times Monday. They particularly noted โdistributed denial-of-serviceโ attacks, which inundate a computer system with requests, potentially clogging up servers until the system becomes inaccessible to legitimate users. Last year, state officials confirmed that election-related servers of at least two Florida counties were breached by Russian meddlers. Sarah Dinkins, a Florida State University student, tried to help her younger sister register Monday night.
Florida governor extends voter registration after site crash
Ron DeSantis extended the stateโs voter registration deadline Tuesday after he said heavy traffic crashed the stateโs online system and potentially prevented thousands of enrolling to cast ballots in next monthโs presidential election. In addition to online registration, DeSantis ordered elections, motor vehicle and tax collectors offices to stay open until that hour for anyone who wanted to register in person. The volume of requests that overwhelmed the Florida registration site Monday was not consistent with denial-of-service attacks, which typically render websites unavailable with barrages of several hundred million requests per second. Sarah Dinkins, a Florida State University student, tried to help her younger sister register Monday night. Ron DeSantis in allowing the stateโs voter registration website to crash on the very last day to register for the upcoming November election is, sadly, completely believable,โ U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said.