Florida official: Server configuration caused voter registration crash
CGTN

Misconfigured computer servers and not a cyber-attack was the cause for the crash of Florida’s voter registration system, according to the state’s chief information officer James Grant.

The crash took place as the deadline for registrations draws closer before next month’s presidential election.

Due to Monday’s outage, Gov. Ron DeSantis allowed for additional registrations for seven hours on Tuesday. Grant told the Associated Press that the voter registration system worked as normal during the extra time after technicians reconfigured the server.

“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. 

He also said that no one had the intention of preventing people from registering to vote, though he acknowledges the system failed on the critical day.

Florida’s Secretary of State Laurel Lee issued a statement saying that it does not appear bad actors caused the registration collapse on Monday. Lee said that the system overloaded when over a million attempts to register came in by the hour.

The state’s online voter registration system, which serves 67 counties, went online in October 2017, but was still prone to problems, though none on the scale of Monday’s meltdown.

The Secretary of State’s Office has put out additional servers to accommodate a registration surge, but they were apparently virtually useless because they were not configured properly.

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