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State and federal authorities in Florida are working to determine the source of technical issues that impacted voter registration on Monday evening.
Florida voters who intend to cast ballots in next month's general election were required to register before midnight. However, the state's online voter registration system crashed just hours ahead of the deadline, and hopeful registrants continued to report access barriers and site delays even after officials said the problem was solved.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced the state's voter registration deadline is extended through 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday during an afternoon press conference addressing the previous night's service interruptions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Florida Department of Law Enforcement are evaluating Monday's website crash "to ensure this was not a deliberate act against the voting process," according to a statement from Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee.
"This morning I met with Governor DeSantis to brief him on the status of the online voter registration system and the challenges we encountered last night due to unprecedented volume and traffic to our website," said Lee, who manages Florida's elections site, in the reported statement.
"We're exploring all options to ensure that all eligible registrants have the ability to register to vote and will work with our state and federal law-enforcement partners to ensure this was not a deliberate act against the voting process," her statement continued. "We will be issuing an update as soon as possible."
Newsweek reached out to Lee and DeSantis' offices for confirmation and additional comments but did not receive replies in time for publication.
Lee acknowledged reports of hopeful Florida voters experiencing registration issues at around 6 p.m. ET on Monday. In a tweet, she said website users "experienced delays while trying to register" for about 15 minutes. Similar to her reported Tuesday statement, Lee attributed the obstruction to website traffic in high volumes.
"We have increased capacity," the state official wrote. "You can register until midnight tonight."
Although Lee's tweet opened with apparent confirmation that Florida's registration system was "online and working," messages posted to its comments section hours later suggest technical problems persisted for some time after. One comment, timestamped at 11 p.m. ET, included a screenshot of the government registration page yielding a bad gateway message.
"Site is still down," the Twitter user wrote alongside the attached screenshot. The user said he was unable to access the registration page after 5 p.m. "This is unacceptable," the user added.
