A lawsuit brought by activist groups after Florida’s voter registration site crashed several times before a deadline for application has been dismissed.
On the final day to register, the state’s online system went down multiple times as people made a last-minute rush to apply.
“We clocked about a cumulative count of the hours that the site was down to be around four hours throughout the day,” William Joel Bravo, senior field manager for Florida Immigrant Coalition, told the Florida Record. “And we know by the amount of people that we were registering—we were registering about 333 people per hour—so we know by the amount of people that were registering to vote that thousands of people must have been disenfranchised by not being able to engage with the online portal.”
Immediately following the crashes, Florida’s Secretary of State Laurel Lee, extended the deadline by 24 hours.
Florida Immigrant Coalition brought a suit against the state to ask for a two-day extension.
“We felt that two days was going to be really crucial to not only have people register to vote, but it takes a little bit of time to communicate that there’s an extension that’s had, it takes time to chase down the people that indicated to us that they weren’t able to register to vote on deadline day, so we felt that those two days would be crucial in engaging people with the democratic process,” Bravo said.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, who ruled on the case, sided with the state, arguing that furthering the extension would augment the confusion and over burden the system, Orlando Weekly reported.
“This is an incredibly close call, but Florida’s interest in preventing chaos in its already precarious — and perennially chaotic — election outweighs the substantial burden imposed on the right to vote,” the judge wrote in his decision as reported by Orlando Weekly.
While he sided with the state, Walker expressed his displeasure with the state’s continued failures concerning the election process.
“Every man who has stepped foot on the moon launched from the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Yet Florida has failed to figure out how to run an election properly — a task simpler than rocket science,” Walker wrote.
Bravo’s answers to voter registration issues like this one is automatic voter registration.
“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.
Anyone who is eligible should automatically be registered, Bravo said. Half a percent of voters decide the election in Florida.
“The inability of some folks on deadline day to register to vote could decide the outcome of the election,” Bravo said.