On the last day Virginians can register to vote, the Virginia Department of Elections site went down.
The website said, "We are in the process of updating the Citizen Portal. Due to these changes, Citizen Portal is temporarily unavailable."
The site also said to check back later for your online voter registration or absentee needs.
- If you would like to apply for voter registration now, you may fill out and print the paper application here.
- If you would like to apply to vote by mail now, you may fill out and print the paper application here.
At 12:45 p.m., the Vita Agency, which supports Virginia by providing cybersecurity, IT infrastructure services and IT governance, provided an update to Virginians on the status of the Virginia Department of Elections. They said they were working as expeditiously as possible but at the time did not have an estimated time of when everything would be up and running.
Technicians learned that a Verizon fiber had been inadvertently struck as part of activities related to a Chesterfield County roadside utilities project, located off of Route 10 in Chester, Virginia. The fiber is located near the Commonwealth Enterprise Solutions Center (CESC), VITA’s headquarters. VITA, Verizon and Chesterfield County are working diligently to ensure that fiber repairs are made and connections are restored as soon as possible.
Technicians have been on site all morning working to repair the fiber cut as expeditiously as possible. While no estimated time of restoration is available as of noon, VITA will continue to provide updates from Verizon’s technician crews as work progresses.
The VITA team continues to collaborate with partner agencies to determine and mitigate associated impacts.
The Virginia Department of Elections said, "We apologize for the inconvenience and are working as quickly as possible to restore the Citizen Portal website" and they added that technicians were on site and working to repair the issue.
Around 3:30 p.m., the VDOE announced that the citizen portal is back up.
Thank you everyone for your patience! The citizen portal is back up, you can go to https://t.co/8vK06RBLHl to register to vote, update information or check your registration status.
— VA Dept of Elections (@vaELECT) October 13, 2020
On Tuesday, Northam said he does not have the authority to change the deadline for registration to vote in Virginia, which is Tuesday, but he said he will support any court ordered change due to the issues.
The City of Virginia Beach posted on social media about the website being down and said, "If you were planning to vote early in-person at the municipal center this morning, the State database is down and anyone who comes in will be asked to vote with a provisional ballot. We will post an update when everything is back up and running."
The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said their centers and website are also experiencing issues saying, "Due to an outage with Virginia's technology provider, DMV's websites, Customer Service Centers, and third party providers including DMV Selects are unable to provide transactions."