October 09, 2012 06:12 PM UTC

GoVoteColorado.com Plagued By Intermittent Outages (Again)

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE #2: FOX 31’s Eli Stokols:

Many Coloradans attempting to register to vote in the election that is now exactly four weeks away are having a hard time using the Secretary of State’s website, which is apparently overloaded ahead of Tuesday’s midnight registration deadline.

With hundreds, perhaps thousands of Coloradans receiving an error message, the website, govotecolorado.com, now includes an apology note atop the page and a link to a paper registration form that can be downloaded and filled out.

While Democrats don’t trust Secretary of State Scott Gessler and are worried about anything that appears to impede voter registration efforts, Gessler’s spokesman tells FOX31 Denver that the website and the servers backing it up are simply struggling to keep up with demand.

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UPDATE: A voter records her failed attempt to register:

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Here’s the message you presently see across the top of Go Vote Colorado, the Secretary of State’s official portal for online voter registration and voter information updates:

It’s a polite message acknowledging that the state’s official voter registration website has had intermittent outages for the last several days. We’ve received several reports of the voter registration tool returning an error or simply timing out. We just tested and found it operating–very slowly, though, ten seconds or more per click. It’s worth noting that Secretary of State Scott Gessler has discouraged outside voter registration groups from building their own interfaces to the state’s voter registration system–which may or may not have helped in this case, depending on what part of the system is failing to work correctly.

It’s also worth noting that these “intermittent outages” happened last year.

Near, and on, the deadline for new registrations. Which is today for the 2012 elections.

Our readers can better address this latest question of malice or incompetence.