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Gov. Ron DeSantis and his secretary of state face legal action from Florida voters and advocacy groups over an alleged “faulty” website that breaks down with heavy use and a refusal to extend the registration deadline accordingly.
This crashing of the website that registers Florida voters and the inflexibility in changing the registration deadline “constitutes a severe burden on the right to vote,” plaintiffs allege.
The complaint, filed by a group of plaintiffs including voting rights groups and several individual Florida voters, says Gov. DeSantis and State Secretary Laurel Lee have “no compelling–or even rational–justification for failing to extend the voter registration deadline” after the website’s crashing just before the deadline on Oct. 5.
Gov. DeSantis did grant Florida voters an extension to register until Oct. 6 but the plaintiffs found the extra day was “inadequate,” The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports.
The plaintiffs are seeking to extend the deadline for Florida voters to at least two more days, according to Politico.
The initial filing claims “enforcement of the October 5…voter registration deadline constitutes an undue burden on the right to vote” because the state’s online voter registration system can’t handle predictable surges in traffic and breaks down or becomes unresponsive for Florida voters.
Outages of the registration system for Florida voters were reported Oct. 3, according to the lawsuit. On Oct. 5, on the last day to register, the system “began experiencing sustained problems.”
These issues, according to the plaintiffs, included getting error codes, or becoming completely unresponsive. Some plaintiffs, including Augusta Namphy, were able to get through partially “by repeatedly refreshing their web browsers, but then encountered other problems.”
Namphy “continually received a 524 error message as he tried for several hours to access” the site, but the system “became unresponsive when he attempted to move past the ‘captcha,’” court documents detail.
The lawsuit alleges Florida voters have dealt with the registration website crashing before and claims there has been ample notice to resolve the issues.
“State elections officials were warned well in advance that the online voter registration site was vulnerable to problems resulting from high usage,” the plaintiffs said.
In the complaint, they point specifically to four instances where this has happened before.
Recently, Florida voters were prevented from registering, according to the lawsuit, in the presidential preference and August primaries.
Around Sept. 22, 2019 on National Voter Registration Day, Florida voters experienced crashes. About a year before that, the system crashed during the Nov. 2018 general election, according to the lawsuit.
“Florida is aware” but “has not taken steps to ensure that the site has the necessary capacity to accommodate the increased demand. The State had every reason to prepare for increased traffic before the 2020 general election in particular,” the plaintiffs said.
Advocacy groups warned that the flood of Florida voters registering would overwhelm the system and even recommended a “stress test” but Gov. DeSantis declined, according to the lawsuit.
“Problems with the website, in fact, were so predictable that Florida advocacy groups began preparing for a likely early-October outage as early as July 2020.”
Additionally, the plaintiffs contend Florida voters “rely much more heavily” on online registration “than usual during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The online system “has become an even more critical point of entry for civic participation,” according to the lawsuit, citing nearly a third of new registrations for 2020 have come in this way.
Are you a Florida voter who has encountered issues registering online? Let us know in the comments below.
Counsel representing plaintiffs in this lawsuit are Jeremy Karpatkin of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP; Chiraag Bains, Stuart Naifeh, Adam Lioz of Dēmos; Kira Romero-Craft of LatinoJustice PRLDEF; Gilda Daniels, Jorge Vasquez, Jennifer Lai-Peterson, Sharion Scott, and Jess Unger of Advancement Project National Office.
The Florida Voters Lawsuit is Namphy, et al v. Desantis, et al., Case No. 4:20-cv-00485-MW-MAF, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division.
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