On the last day of voter registration, Virginia residents hoping to register for the upcoming election were surprised to see that the website portal was down. According to the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, a fiber was cut near Route 10 in Chester, impacting virtual private network (VPN) connectivity for several state agencies, including the department of elections, the DMV, department of health, and employment commission.
When residents attempted to visit the registration portal, they were met with a message saying it was temporarily unavailable.
"We apologize for the inconvenience and are working as quickly as possible to restore the Citizens Portal website," election officials said.
As of 11:30 a.m., systems were still down but technicians were working on repairing the fiber. Because of the outage, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax said Tuesday's deadline should be moved back.
"I am officially calling for Virginia's Registration Deadline to be extended beyond today due to the service outages impacting voters' ability to register statewide," he said in a tweet Tuesday. "We will work with the Administration to resolve this issue and ensure all voters have access to #Vote."
City officials in Virginia Beach alerted residents of the issues, saying that anyone planning to vote early in-person will be given a provisional ballot.
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