Judge John Gibney Jr. said the order would extend to both online registration and in-person registration.
“You can’t go back in time and register people,” Gibney said. Absent his intervention, “Almost an entire day of voter registration will be lost.”
The computer outage was caused when a construction crew hit a fiber data line during their work. For much of the day Tuesday, visitors to the state portal were met with this message: “Due to a network outage the Citizen Portal is temporarily unavailable.”
The state board of elections and Department of Elections supported a petition filed by the New Virginia Majority Education Fund and other groups to extend the deadline by 48 hours.
“If we have problems with local registrars who decide that this order does not require them to allow additional registration, you have my phone,” Gibney told the parties. “I will give them a suggestion.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.
