Florida voting website crashes after Ariana Grande urges fans to vote
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A social media post from Ariana Grande encouraging Florida residents to register to vote may have played a part in the state’s voter registration site crashing.
On Monday afternoon, the 27-year-old singer urged followers of her Twitter and Instagram accounts to register to vote in Florida before the deadline later that day.
On Twitter and Instagram, Grande wrote: “Fellow Floridians, we need you. today is the last day to register to vote.
“If you haven’t yet or if you know of a friend or family member that hasn’t, it’s imperative that you make sure they register today because Florida has the potential of swaying the election.”
Her social media posts linked to the organisation Headcount.org, which is dedicated to helping young people register to vote, according to the Orlando Weekly.
A post shared by Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) on Oct 5, 2020 at 12:04pm PDT
Grande, who was born in Boca Raton, Florida, has around 77.5 million followers on Twitter and 203.6 million on Instagram. Her tweet garnered at least 65,000 likes and 7,400 retweets on Monday, while her Instagram post received around 723,000 likes.
Shortly after she urged Florida residents to register to vote, users of the registration website started seeing error messages, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Users also experienced glitches and many of them found themselves unable to register, as the website experienced an “unprecedented” surge in traffic, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
On Tuesday morning, after several people had reported that they had been unable to register, Grande tweeted: “Yikes #VoterSuppression @GovRonDeSantis please extend registrations.”
yikes #VoterSuppression @GovRonDeSantis please extend registrations https://t.co/UYup8lSREY
— Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) October 6, 2020
In response to the issue, Florida secretary of state Laurel Lee extended the deadline until 7pm on Tuesday, which governor Ron DeSantis argued equalled the amount of time that had been affected.
On Tuesday morning, Ms Lee said that she would work with state law enforcement to rule out the possibility that the website’s issues were the result of “malicious activity”.
Florida is a key battleground state in the 3 November presidential election, between president Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
Last year, Mr DeSantis confirmed that Russian hackers breached two county elections systems in the state in 2016, and fears of interference remain for next month’s election.
On Tuesday evening, Ms Lee released a statement saying no malicious activity was involved in the website’s issues, but confirmed that more than a million attempts were made to register in the space of an hour, according to the Associated Press.
It is unclear how many people attempted to register to vote because of Grande, and Florida officials have not yet commented on her possible influence.
However, Florida's chief information officer James Grant told the AP on Wednesday that an error with the configuration of the servers limited the site's capacity “to a fraction of a fraction of what it was capable of.”
He said that after the servers were reconfigured and the capacity was increased, the system was given a “whole lot more horsepower” and worked as expected.
On Tuesday, several voting groups filed a lawsuit against Florida, where they argued that the extension was not sufficient, due to the significant issues with the system on Monday.
US district chief judge Mark Walker, based in Tallahassee, dismissed their calls for an immediate extension, but said he would consider the demand at a hearing on Thursday.
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