EU referendum frenzy bazookas online voter registration. It's another #GovtDigiShambles

A pity that whilst Corbyn can pontificate about registering to vote he can't seem to be bothered to vote himself on something as important as the IP Bill.

Why is that?

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2016-06-07/division/16060743001404/InvestigatoryPowersBill?outputType=Names

"Asked yesterday why the site had crashed, the Cabinet Office was unable to say but said its executives were in a meeting to determine the cause."

I'm sure that will help....

You pay peanuts...

..you get monkeys

I'm in two minds about this...

One part of me says sod those who left it until 10pm or later yesterday - we've known for months there's going to be a referendum, and the voter registration site has been up for even longer, so if you're really interested in voting, you've had plenty of time already.

The other side of me says it's human nature to leave things to the last minute (how many people file their tax returns in the last hours of Jan 31st every year?), and the government should have specified the servers could be capable of handing the expected last minute surge.

Presumably the service was set up in expectation of a certain demand.

That a lot of people decided at the last minute (almost literally) to register, when the portal had been available for weeks, and publicised as such, is unfortunate but was it predictable?

If you are of a suspicious mind, you could conceive that as the recent surge in registration was among younger voters, who are predicted to be more Remain than Leave, that the 'crash' might have been down to Brexiteers trying to overload system and thus gerrymander the outcome.

I wouldn't put it past a group of anti-referendum activists paying for a DDOS so they could throw the result into question.

determine why its voter registration site crashed

Please let me think hard about this... OK, having consulted my extensive experience and know-how, it's because too many people, all at once, wanted to register by deadline. Think leaves on the railway track, snow in winter, online tax returns,etc. These are ALWAYS totally unexpected.

p.s. I prefer my £1M consultancy fee as a check, rather than bank transfer and it's got nothing to do with my unwavering faith in NatWest banking system.

So the site failed with and hour and a half to go before the deadline because loads of people suddenly tried to register to vote.

And then people complain.

Really?

Look guys, It's the most important decision we're going to make in a generation, and you've had months and months of build-up.

Given that, why did you leave it it till 10:30pm on the last possible day to finally decide to register to vote? Was that really sensible? What does it say about how much you actually care about the issues you'll be voting on?

Pardon me if I don't have any sympathy for you if the site happened to be down at the time. You had plenty of time to do it.

I have more sympathy for the site administrators who probably had a wretched night trying their best to keep the thing up and running for those last few hours, just to support a bunch of lazy muppets who couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes visiting the site at any time during the preceding months.

Retards

Simon Harris above is much more charitable than me. If people are really interested in voting they should be registered anyway and not leave it until the last minute to attempt to register. I don't see it as a failure of the system. Corbyn is a f**kwit and of course the deadline should not be extended.

Did they use the same consultants as HMRC?

Sounds like the annual tax return deadline debarcle!

Maybe gov.uk should think about using containers and dynamically spinning up instances in services like Azure and AWS when demand dictates.

if I were cynical

I would say that the government expected this crash, hoping to wake up those still on the sidelines. After all, most of those trying to register yesterday were probably the stayers. And to extend the deadline, at a price of being ridiculed is... a small price, really. In a way, to continue with conspiracy theory, such a crash would have been a master stroke, proving on one hand that our dear governement is so incompentent, it can't even organize a proper exit vote, let alone managing on its own once we're out. And the exit lot can't argue too hard for NOT extending the deadline, even though they know most of the lot would be the stayers, because they're trying to show that we can easily manage (the universe and everything) on our own. Well, clearly we can't ;).

But, with a rule of the thumb (dumb-dumb) and cynic/tinfoil hat off, it was probably just the usual lack of forward thinking about human nature in the one to midnight situation. We're too incompetent to hatch a successful plot, and are more or less the complete opposite of Ian Banks (nb, died two years ago tomorrow), v. his Hydrogen Sonata ;)

This is one of those rare times when using a cloud based system that could spin up an extra bunch of servers on short notice would have been a good idea.

Hmmmm

So Corbyn was checking the site was working until the end and we can probably presume others were doing the same. Sooooo did the site crash because so many people were checking it was up and had nothing to do with the amount of people trying to register?

I'd imagine it was two groups....

(1) The lot who weren't registered, decided to register and finally woke up to the deadline. Expect to see them arrive at polling stations at 9.59pm and then throw a strop when they can't get in.

(2) The lot who registered months ago and had a wee panic since they haven't had their polling card yet.

I think group 2 will be larger.

In other arse-elbow news last week it came out that people not entitled to vote had been issued polling cards.

Cut the late registrants some slack

Because term times?

This is the time of year when many undergrad courses coming to an end, exams & other to a deadline work.

Many of these students possibly changing address after term ends.

With exams on their mind, vote registration at address they will be in for late June vote could well be not exactly the most important thing on their minds (e.g. shall I do a few minutes more revision for my finals or shall I register online a few days in advance)

Would be interested to know how many "last minute registrations" are students.

Additionally, vote registration has been publicised, but a lot of the previously unregistered might have missed the "publicity" & only noticed in the last few days as publicity of registration closing only reached peak intensity over the last few days (it's very easy these days for people to consume little "mainstream" media where much publicity was)

Maybe some people had started earlier but found they needed time to discover required information (e.g. NI number) & so revisited teh site a day or 2 after first visit

And obviously, given a deadline lots of people wait until it is nearly reached, just because humans are a bit contrary & prioritise lots of other stuff over some distant "quick & easy" task.

This is due to unprecedented demand.

You don't say. Of course there's no precedent for a Brexit referendum, because there's never been one.

That said, how hard can it be to make an educated guess about the capacity needed? (EDIT: and/or design it properly so that it scales?)

Can anybody please name any GDS project that hasn't failed spectacularly (or is about to)?

A Good IT manager would have whipped out a credit card and upped their subscription to AWS,Azure, Google Cloud.

Assuming of course that a service that was expected to have a massive peak and with a political 'Failure is not an option' status had back up hosting, even if only to capture details to be processed securely later.

lastminutue.com

are taking over the hosting.... ;-0

If you are so stupid that you leave registering to vote until two hours before the deadline then you really don't deserve the vote in the first place.

Corbyn would be better employed campaigning on the issue and trying to mobilise those that are bright enough to have registered than doing his usual Spartist trick of sniping, sneeringly from the sidelines.

But loads of people were de-registered from voting...

... and only when they check do they realise this is the case, so maybe some of the extra load came from that:

http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/all-these-people-just-lost-the-vote--WyYlMY3Hax

Crazy idea for the future..Advertise the final day to register as 1 day prior to the real deadline. Site crashes, due to people leaving it until last minute. Oh go on then, have an extra 24hrs to do it.. :p

Why isn't this cloud based?

And why didn't additional servers come online as demand increased?

All the visa applications

Once the UK is out of the EU, all the people from the UK have to start filling out visa applications before they go on holiday to Spain, Portugal, France and so on.

It is going to next to impossible for people from UK to move to other country in Europe, being outside EU and all.

Hire Amazon*

Seriously. Just write them a cheque and be done with it.

They've built a business on being available 24/7/365, before, during, and after peak shopping days, in the most consumerist country on the planet.

You want reliable uptime? Hire someone who's already succeeding.

*example. Quite sure there are others.

Query: was the failed registration IT internal, or outsourced to the lowest bidder?

Last minute registrations with the same pathetic excuses...

... as the idiots to be seen screaming abuse at Easyjet staff when the said idiots realise that when someone says there's a deadline that they really mean there's a deadline. I've seen people screaming that they "Were delayed by security but ran all the way to the gate" who mysteriously had time to visit the duty free shop.

This referendum has been publicised for weeks. The notification to register went out in January (although voters should have registered last year - renewal is now automatic). That's five months during which the idiots could have registered, but apparently they thought it would be a good idea to leave it until 10PM on the day that registration closes.

Why did people leave it to the last min to register. Cant blame it all on the Government if everyone registers on the last day all at the same time.

Deadline

It seems a lot of people here, seem to think deadline actually means some unspecified time before the actual time stated as a deadline. Why is that?

Morons...

If people are leaving their registration to the last minute then that person clearly cannot be trusted with such an important decision and doesn't deserve a vote.

I have always said Polling Stations should be in a Maze to keep the great unwashed from making a decision purely because Benedict Cummerbund or Keira 'Twice nightly' Knightly says so.

Now the integrity of the referendum result is in question, not just because of this omnishambles, but also because of the vast number of EU nationals who have been sent polling cards by mistake. Whatever the result we're going to have huge social unrest this July as the losing side kick off, a new PM within weeks and years of uncertainly that will shag the economy until it looks like a punched lasagne (Stay OR leave!!)

This is why we can't have nice things!! Fuck!

I despair....

Until the cause is identified then you cant say for sure that lower-demand would have helped anything.

But IMHO it would have been wise to push people to register for this early, stating something along the lines of (Leaving it to the last moment means the server might not be able to process your request).

When people hear that there is a discounts on phones or computers they don't ask when the last day is so they can go in and buy them then, they just go and buy it "while there is still time".

But IMHO it would have been wise to push people to register for this early

Which is what the electoral commission did. They were even briefing during radio news (multiple channels) on Monday morning stating that leaving registration until the last minute would be unwise since that may mean that people would be unable to register in time for the deadline. It's difficult to see how they could have been any clearer about the risks, and let's not forget everyone of voting age is obliged by law to register not five seconds before a deadline, but in Autumn of the preceding year and to notify the electoral registration officer if their details change.

Here's the advice given about registration:

"With 'rolling registration' in force, it means that the register is updated every month. However, applications need to be received several weeks before publication to guarantee inclusion "

"An annual canvass still takes place every autumn to ensure the register is up-to-date. There is no monthly update during September, October or November during the annual canvass period when all households have to register. A new Register is usually published on 1 December."

Isn't that clear?

Lets be honest here; if you've left it tot the last minute of the last available day to register to vote you'v only got yourself to blame. It's not as if this referendum has been kept quiet now is it?