Florida: Voter registration website overwhelmed at deadline

Thu Oct 8 04:26:39 UTC 2020

This is not the first, and won't be the last, problem that happens during 
this election season.  Unless there is substantial and credible evidence 
otherwise, the normal reason for an technology outage will likely be the 
normal stupid reasons for technology outages.

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Florida’s chief information officer said Wednesday that misconfigured 
computer servers were to blame for the crash of the state’s voter 
registration system as the deadline approached for enrolling to cast 
ballots in next month’s presidential election.

[...]

James Grant told The Associated Press in an interview that the voter 
registration system worked as expected during that extra time after 
technicians reconfigured existing servers, expanding the network’s 
capacity and giving the system a “whole lot more horsepower.”

He said it is unknown how many people were prevented from registering to 
vote during Monday’s bottleneck.

Grant said no one had any intention of preventing people from registering 
to vote, but he acknowledged that the system failed on a critical day.

“The servers were configured in a way that reduced its capacity to a 
fraction of a fraction of what it was capable of,” Grant said.