Just days before Tuesday’s deadline to register to vote in Georgia, all voter registration shut down for nearly the entire day Friday at every Department of Driver Services location in the state. The department said its software operator, the global corporation IDEMIA, had taken full responsibility for the failure. David Connell, the chairman of the DDS’ oversight board, said he was confident in the vendor’s statement that the problem resulted from a database overload, not a cyber intrusion. “It’s an issue we all wish wouldn’t have happened,” Connell said. IDEMIA did not respond to a phone message left by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at its Virginia representative office.
During the outage, which was resolved by the close of Friday, the agency could not issue a driver’s license or renew a driver’s license, but it could reinstate a driver’s license.
Connell and a spokesperson for DDS said that to make up for the outage, more than 40 of its locations statewide would open Saturday and Monday — Columbus Day — when they usually would be closed. They will only be open until noon Saturday and 1 p.m. Monday. The locations are listed on the DDS website at https://dds.georgia.gov/more. Whether a location is open depended on whether the DDS could find enough staff able and willing to come in.
Full Article: Outage halts voter registration at Ga. driver’s license offices.