Judge orders Virginia voter registration reopened

A federal judge has ordered voter registration in Virginia reopened through midnight tomorrow due to a failure of the state's registration website earlier this week.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton issued the order Thursday morning, saying it would "make amends" for the state's site being down beginning at mid-afternoon Monday, which was the last day to register under Virginia law.


"I think you're entitled to some relief [for] people who had trouble on the last day," Hilton said during a brief hearing in his Alexandria courtroom.

Virginia residents will now be able to register through the restored site, as well as in person at county or city registrar's offices and by mail postmarked by Friday, Virginia Commissioner of Elections Edgardo Cortes told reporters. Mail-in applications submitted earlier this week will also be processed to allow voting in next month's election, he said.

A civil rights group, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, sued late Tuesday to reopen the registration period, including as plaintiffs some individuals who said they tried to register through the site Monday and failed. They were seeking a new, 72-hour registration period, saying it was needed to notify all those who might have tried to register online without success.

The state ultimately agreed to the shorter extension Hilton issued Thursday.

Hilton said he didn't think the 72-hour extension was necessary and that he was only acting to remedy Monday's failure not "just for the sake of extending" the deadline.

The judge asked Virginia Assistant Attorney General Anna Birkenheier whether it would be possible to send emails to people who tried to register Monday, but she said the site wasn't able to record any information during the period when it was down.

Lawyers Committee attorney John Freedman told Hilton that an extension of just 36 hours or so might cause congestion on the website and could lead to another crash. The judge said he wasn't inclined to do anything about that now, but would leave the case open to address a possible further extension if there's another round of problems.

Cortes said his office saw strong demand in the lead-up to the deadline, with "tens of thousands" of Virginians successfully registering online before the website outage Monday.

Despite a series of hacking attempts aimed at state voter registration databases, Cortes said there's no indication that's what happened Monday. He said the system was simply overwhelmed.

"There was no hacking involved. We had an unprecedented level of activity on our site due to promotions by Facebook and Google to encourage Virginians to register to vote or update their information," the Virginia election chief said. "Their campaign was incredibly effective and we’re happy voters are making use of our online tools but we’re obviously very upset our technology could not support this much activity."

