The state is extending the deadline to register to vote in Florida by a day.
The deadline is now 7 p.m. today due to issues with the state’s voter registration website, wrote Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee in a release. The Alachua County Supervisor of Elections office will stay open until 7 p.m. on Tuesday, past their normal closing time of 5 p.m., to accommodate the extension.
Alachua County residents can register to vote through the county’s Supervisor of Elections website. Florida residents can register through the state’s voter registration portal.
Following the website crash on Monday night, multiple Florida Democratic leaders called for the state to extend the deadline.
Joe Biden, the former vice president and current Democratic candidate for president, tweeted that the extension was a, “win for our democracy.”
The state’s voter registration website received 1.1 million requests on Monday night, an unprecedented volume of traffic to the website, Lee said in a statement. The state plans to investigate the issues with the site, per the release.
“We will work with our state and federal law-enforcement partners to ensure this was not a deliberate act against the voting process,” Lee said in a statement.
Gainesville was the seventh-largest metro area searching for voter registration information on Monday, according to Google Trends. As of Tuesday at about 2 p.m., 188,702 people are registered to vote in Alachua County for November’s election, and more than 11,000 have already voted through mail-in ballots. More than 700,000 people have already voted in Florida, according to ElectProject.
Steven Walker is the Fall 2021 Editor in Chief of The Alligator. He has previously worked at the Orlando Sentinel; and has bylines in the Miami Herald, Associated Press and Florida Times Union. In his free time, he likes to take long walks with his dog Luna and watch his favorite sports teams, the Orlando Magic and the Green Bay Packers.
