Couldn’t register to vote Monday? DeSantis did the right thing on Tuesday | Editorial

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went a long way to quell conspiracy theories that Monday’s untimely sputtering of the state’s online voter registration website was a vote-suppression ploy.

Thousands of people trying to register to vote by Monday night’s deadline encountered slow responses and error messages on the state’s online voter registration site, RegisterToVoteFlorida.gov.

After cries of foul play from Democratic legislative members, including State Sen. Jason Pizzo, local politicos and even Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the only Democrat in the Cabinet, the governor announced midday on Tuesday that he would extend the deadline to 7 p.m. for registration online, in person or by mail.

That was the right thing to do.

The main excuse for the partial crash is that during the last few hours before the deadline, the site had been accessed by an “unprecedented” 1.1 million requests per hour.

It appears the site faced pretty much the same troubles that plagued the state’s unemployment benefits system at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is still some suspicion as to what happened Monday. The Florida Department of State is working with federal law enforcement officials to look at whether there were any “deliberate acts against the voting process” that caused or contributed to the partial crash of the system, according to Secretary of State Laurel Lee.

On Wednesday, the state’s chief information officer, James Grant, said said that misconfigured computer servers were to blame for Monday’s crash of the state’s voter registration system on deadline day.

Grant told the Associated Press 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.

So the question is: why were the servers configured for such low capacity?

Let’s see what more they uncover, but DeSantis did the best he could to even the playing field, in the event that there was fraud., or just the work of another faulty state website.

Still, the most surprising revelation from the snafu is that the system saw 1.1 million requests per hour.. How that translates to the polls on Nov. 3 is the real mystery.

The editorial was updated Wednesday with information on what caused the state’s voter registration website to malfunction on Monday.