To think it's your own fault and you've had ages to sort it!

[Hurryhurryhurry]

Heard the news on the radio about up to 1 million people registering to vote yesterday... On the last day!
Then the site crashed and now many people are annoyed that they couldn't register and want the deadline to be extended.

Wtf! Aibu to think why did you leave it until yesterday?!

The deadline for your tax return is the end of January...
But a lot of people fail to submit on time because they wait till the last minute and the HMRC site can't cope...

The governemnt probably wanted to extend it because the late registers will mostly be young people who are disengaged from politics by the professional class like Dave and JC... Without enough of life to understand the pitfalls of the EU bureaucracy they are likely to vote remain.

Would recommend not leaving registering for tax return to the last minute. Have been trying to register for nearly a month now and seem to have entered a dead mans land! Every way I try to get it sorted I hit a dead end! Even phoning HMRC - always too busy to deal with call so hang up on me! Online doesn't work as they have an old address which I can't change online.

SolomanDaisy
A least expats can vote in UK elections. Scottish people living in England had no say in the Scottish referendum!

www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/10/government_gds_grilling_eu_deadline_online_crash/

MPs have taken the Government’s digital masters to task for their inability to handle online voter registration for this month’s European Union referendum.

Members grilled Cabinet Office minister for Government Policy Oliver Letwin after the Government Digital Service’s EU voter registration site crashed under "unexpected" demand.

MPs tackled Letwin over his apparent complacency over the crash after he described the outage as “inevitable".

There were calls, too, for an investigation of the crash and its implications on UK democracy by the Electoral Commission.

The Gov.uk voter registration site crashed in the final hours before the deadline of 23:59 on Tuesday. Gov.uk is one of many websites and online services run by GDS.

Letwin and GDS were in the dock as MPs had to rush law through Parliament to extend the deadline to register to vote in the referendum.

The Government now believes a “large proportion” of applications may be duplicates.

Liam Fox MP, a prominent member of the Vote Leave campaign, called the incident another chapter in the “sad tale of Government, the public sector and IT”.

“I am very surprised that it crashed,” Fox told Letwin in Parliament's emergency debate.

“Why did the Electoral Commission not make sufficient arrangements to determine whether its system could cope with the demand? How do we know that it will not happen again? If we have another deadline tonight, how do we know that the system will not crash in exactly the same way?”

Earlier, Letwin had sought to pass off the website’s outage as something to be expected.

Clearly reciting the script handed him by GDS, Letwin told the Commons:

“I am not a technical expert in computing, but I’m advised by those in the Cabinet Office and the Government Digital Service that, as far as they can make out, there was no untoward event whatsoever. There was simply an incapacity [sic] of the system to handle that number of applications," he said.

“The system is designed to be scoped to deal with a certain number of simultaneous events, and that number was exceeded during that period, so in retrospect, it was not surprising that it fell over.”

Letwin claimed there’d been “a massive amount of load testing” but “the system was tested with the assumption that we would not face anything like the extent of the difference between what had been experienced previously... and now.”

He claimed registration was three times that of registration for a general election. The site as upgraded to handle six times the number of registrations for an election.

MPs were not buying it.

Both SNP MPs and members of Letwin's own Conservative party called for post-match analysis of the web site’s crash and for an investigation systems for the automate registration of votes in future.

PM David Cameron has given huge credit to GDS. In a statement on the GDS website, he says: “I believe the creation of the Government Digital Service is one of the great unsung triumphs of the last Parliament.”

It annoys me that many of the people who moan that the EU is undemocratic have never even bothered to be registered to vote in an EU election.

People used to do this at my uni. They'd try to submit assignments 2 minutes to the deadline, the system would crash or it would be so slow that by the time it loaded it was past the deadline time.

It annoys me that many of the people who moan that the EU is undemocratic have never even bothered to be registered to vote in an EU election

On the flip side many people moan about people voting for out but don't register?

This referendum is not a surprise. It should not be a surprise that you need to be registered to vote.

when I had to deal with idiot managers, the rule was 'your disorganisation is not my crisis'. (they didn't like it...). It's quite a good life rule too.

I doubt that all those people have just turned 18 or just moved house.

[in USA] show up with your Driving License (which has your current address) plus passport and vote at the polling station for your local area. It is a great system and something the UK should copy.

Have you forgotten that many people UK don't drive and there was universal horror @ national ID cards?

National ID cards would solve a few things. I think the USA equivalents only cost about £18 ($30), too.

If you don't drive you have a state ID. Same thing but minus right to drive.

If they can do it here with 300 million people they can do it in the UK.

You have really lost track of how MEAN British people are with their money.

lijkk

I don't think you pay for a state ID. You pay if you have driving privileges.

There is some sort of low income exemption otherwise it's one of the few taxes on driving.

We're not prepared to have government photo ID here. Two strong attempts in last 25 years have failed miserably. So plenty of people have no photo ID.

Thing is, in USA the ID card was used like a cheque guarantee card. And for buying alcohol. Or to collect a parcel. So there were benefits to having one.
Free for seniors, $8 for concessions, $28 for rest (California).
To get the $8 version, a lot of folk won't admit to being on welfare, it's a point of shame.
Anyway, considering the fuss folk on here can make about £5...

Plus the USA isn't that great - or haven't you been following the latest election? Lots of local offices for getting Driving licenses/ID have closed, and these in some states are especially those which serve the poorest areas. Not everyone in the poorest households has ID or a Driving license (especially in poor urban areas), they don't have bank accounts and so haven't needed them - and now they don't have a local office if they want to register to vote.

Nevermind requiring everyone has in state ID, which students often don't both to change, or various other changes which seem designed to stop certain groups voting.

Not having ID is a massive deal here in Canada. You need it for all sorts of things. There s a local MP who organizes ID clinics to get ID for all the homeless people.

I would hate the UK to go that route. The two reasons I went off the Labour party were; floating ideas about compulsory ID and Iraq.

mummy I live here. It's not perfect but neither is the UK. Sometimes other countries do things better than us and it's worth copying their system. I do think the U.S. has the right approach with IDs. It's incredibly easy to get an ID. Heck you can get an ID if you are an illegal immigrant. Sure that ID doesn't enable you to vote which is why you need your passport.

MrsP Homeless people here don't pay for their state ID. In our town of they want a State ID it's processed by the local YMCA. They also had a town clerk come to the shelter to register anyone who wanted to vote for the primary. My town is turning Republican and it's the best thing to happen to this town. All of a sudden our elected officials are actually doing their job plus they have been doing anything and everything to get traditionally democrat voters registered.

Yabu

For starters I am VERY sceptical regarding this govt's management of elections. There are currently TWENTY police forces investigating the actions during the general election wrt vote rigging, expenditure etc.

there's TONS of reasons people may not have registered until this week.

'Also Icebeing has a point about how many people actually would have to register on the last day - those moving house or turning 18. They'll be others who've been in hospital, bereaved, injured, whatever. 1 million people isn't actually that much compared to the whole population.'

Based on ONS stats (2013 but I doubt it's changed much) 135,000 people will simply have moved house this week. Fri/sat is the most popular day but as most of us who've moved house will know there's a lot going on that will seem of more immediate urgency. This figure is also only WITHIN the uk. So won't include ex-pats or military movement.

Then there's
Patients being released from hospital/long term care
Prisoners
Immigrants who've only become eligible in the last week

There's also been issues with problems with the tech in local areas/with local councils.

Ah that's 135,000 HOUSEHOLDS so probably at least 2 adults involved in each move.

I always thought the timing of the referendum was awful in terms of young people.

May / June is exam season. Typically I always finished my exams and went home around the start of June. I think my last exams were usually right at the start of June.

The deadline was possibly also in the worse week too for that reason. There would have been plenty of students who were concerned about exams and possibly didn't give it a lot of thought as they were wrapped in that.

Plus the publicity generated by the deadline being extended was far more than the advertising of the deadline.

I'm not entirely surprised there was a rush at the last minute.

The trouble is that it is now going to undermine any result, particularly a close remain vote. I can see the debate raging for years in that situation.

To return to the original question... Yes, you're being unreasonable to think that an IT crash is the fault of someone registering to vote.

The registration process was open for a pre-defined time. All registrations are equal: registrations in the last ten minutes are the equal of those in the first ten minutes. There is no virtue in registering early.

When the system failed, of course there must be an extension.

This always happens OP. It's a bit like asking 'why do we have to have floods'?....A great many people probably wouldn't have even considered registering until the furore about getting in on time started. Too late now, so tough titty!!!!

I'm sure that there is some psychological study that says this is normal behaviour and should be planned for - otherwise you are disenfranchising people.

If it can be predicted you can't say tough titty.