Potential voters expressed frustration after it appeared they had been prevented from registering in time to take part in the EU referendum because of a system fault.
The government’s official website crashed on Tuesday less than two hours before a midnight deadline to sign up. On Wednesday the government said the deadline would be extended to midnight on Thursday.
Ian Preece, a 55-year-old videographer from Plymouth, spent two hours online trying to register on Tuesday but only managed to complete his application after midnight.
“It took me a long time. I felt extremely angry. I fully accept leaving it so late was a bit silly, but to be perfectly honest I hadn’t made up my mind whether I was going to vote because I’m so sick of being lied to by politicians,” he said. “I don’t think my vote matters a damn anyway. I haven’t voted for 20 years. It’s only out of pure bloodymindedness that I persevered and tried to register.”
The crash risked disenfranchising thousands of people in what is widely regarded as the most important vote in Britain for a generation. Oliver Sidorczuk, the director of Bite the Ballot, a charity that encourages young people to engage in politics, said the website crash may have dented the momentum to get out the vote.
“Ultimately, the crash wasn’t helpful. When you set a deadline everyone makes an effort to make it engaging and exciting. It’s promising. There was that risk that people thought: OK, I’ve been told tens of times to do it, so I’ll do it,” Sidorczuk said.
Jun Kit Man, a 30-year-old blogger from Bromley, spent 40 minutes battling slow-loading pages and time-out errors. He fears that people less technically minded would have been easily deterred by the technical issues, and is dismayed by the complicated registration process.
“I know I was late, but sometimes life gets in the way and, crucially, I never had my national insurance number to hand, which I nowknow I didn’t need. I spent ages scrabbling around for it,” he said.
“When I got website errors, I had to try it in various browsers simultaneously. I think this would cause anxiety for less technically minded people. If this happened to me then it must have happened to a lot of people. It was unnecessarily stressful. I almost felt like giving up but I’m a very determined person.”
David Cameron has urged people who could not register to try again. His intervention followed pressure from the elections watchdog and leaders of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who led calls for an extension to the voter registration deadline.
Calls to simplify the process or to follow the US approach of automatic voter registration will be given renewed energy after the technical failure. Sidorczuk said the government’s flexibility in offering extra time was positive and showed that the mood was changing.
Fenella Ellyatt, a 56-year-old cheesemaker from Guernsey, was also put off by the process, in particular the misinformation regarding the need for a national insurance number.
“I finally found my national insurance number by 10 o’clock last night. Of course you’re more keen on doing it when you can’t; it’s like having something snatched away from you,” she said.
“I’m very happy I’m potentially able to do it today. I’m going to do a proxy vote, because it’s too late for a postal vote and I didn’t realise. I don’t think they’ve advertised it very much.”
