Hours before deadline, Florida’s voter registration website malfunctions

By WILL MCDUFFIE, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Monday night, with the clock ticking on Florida’s midnight deadline to register to vote, people across the state encountered problems with the state’s registration website, prompting frustrated calls for Florida’s leaders to extend the deadline.

Just before 6 p.m., Secretary of State Laurel Lee posted on Twitter announcing that the website’s functions had been restored and that a “high volume” of visitors had caused delays for about 15 minutes.

Hours after the announcement, however, the website was still giving people fits.

Destinee Morin, a recent high school graduate from St. Cloud, who is already registered, spent much of Monday unsuccessfully refreshing the website, Registertovoteflorida.gov, in an attempt to register two friends, both of them teenagers and would-be first-time voters.

Morin said she had problems since mid-afternoon.

“If the website is down, that’s not fair. A lot of people went on that website today because they didn’t realize it was their last day to register,” she said. “I really hope they extend it.”

Carl Morelli, a 23-year old Gainesville resident looking to update his registration after moving to a new apartment in August, tried the website for the first time at 9:15 p.m. but was met with glitches after completing the first step. After more than two hours of switching internet browsers and even computers, he almost gave up.

“It was getting down to the last 10 minutes and I was about ready to throw in the towel, but I said, ‘Let me just give it a few more tries,’” he told ABC News.

At 11:55 p.m., he successfully registered.

“I was really happy and excited that I was going to be able to vote,” he said.

Others weren’t so lucky.

Kyle Redula, 20, a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, was eager to register to vote for the first time, only to find himself struggling for hours with the website Monday. As the deadline came and went, he was still receiving error messages.

“It’s definitely something that I was looking forward to,” he told ABC News. “Considering this is the Department of State website and it’s been giving me problems, it’s been frustrating.”

The issues with the website prompted angry responses on Twitter from Democrats in the state, among them Nikki Fried, Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and Florida’s lone statewide elected Democrat.

“The voter registration deadline is just hours away, and the online voter registration website is broken,” she wrote.

Addressing Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, Fried called the situation “unacceptable” and urged him to “fix it.”

In a later post, Fried wrote that the developments Monday night amounted to “voter suppression” and called on Lee and DeSantis to extend the registration deadline.

Lee has not issued a public statement since she announced the problems had supposedly been fixed, and there is no indication yet that an extension will be granted.

ABC News has reached out to her office, as well as the governor’s, for comment.

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