A technical problem with Virginia’s statewide voter registration system has led to significant delays in the processing of new voter registrations and updates to existing ones.

As a result of the delay, the commonwealth’s elections office sent a big batch of more than 100,000 voter records to local registrars to process, an unexpected volume of work for local officials on top of ongoing efforts to run early voting sites and prepare for Election Day, which is less than five weeks away.

“All affected registrations have been sent to local registrars for processing to ensure voters can be appropriately registered to vote,” said elections commissioner Susan Beals in a statement. “The issue is now resolved and all impacted registrations have been identified.

“No voter registration data was lost, but the issue will cause an increase in processing voter registration applications at the local level,” Beals’ statement continued. Beals said “intermittent network issues” were to blame.

The Virginia Department of Elections did not provide further details about the cause of the delay — which frustrated some lawmakers. Sen. Lionell Spruill (D-Chesapeake) sent a public letter to Beals on Thursday requesting more details and criticizing the department for failing to be transparent with the General Assembly and the public.

The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 17. State and local officials said that they were confident they’d be able to get through the backlog by then — in time to notify registered voters of where their polling place is. (This year, in an added twist, Virginians can also register at the polls on Election Day and cast a provisional ballot, which will be counted once the registration is verified.)

The Virginia Public Access Project, which tracks elections and spending in the commonwealth, discovered the problem when analysis showed a noticeable dip in the number of voter registrations being processed by the state this summer. In May, the state processed more than 20,000 registrations — but that number plummeted in June to less than 8,800. Between June and September, the number has slowly rebounded, back to 20,000 — which is well behind the expected trend for a midterm election year.

VPAP characterized the technical problems in the state system as “connectivity issues.” The report published Wednesday estimated that the glitch could have impacted 40,000 new voter registrations, based on “the difference between the 2022 trend lines before and after the connectivity problems began.”

“This week, the Department of Elections provided local voting registrars with a backlog of 107,000 DMV transactions, which include address changes, new registrations and other changes,” VPAP reported. “The exact number of new registrations delayed will not be determined until work is completed by local registrars, who are responsible for maintaining the voter file.”

Local officials are still getting a sense of the scope of their particular pieces of the state backlog — and how shouldering them will impact staff time in county elections offices. In Fairfax, officials estimate that they received 11,000 voter registrations to process from the state, work that will be done by 10 elections employees who are already dedicated to voter registration work. In Alexandria, the local registrar is handling 2,400 applications.

The processing delay is far from the first technical issue impacting Virginia elections. The Virginia Elections and Registration Information System, the system that processes voter registration paperwork and maintains the commonwealth’s voter rolls, was originally put in place in 2007 and has long struggled with glitches. A 2018 report requested by the General Assembly’s legislative oversight committee found VERIS “not sufficiently functional or reliable.”

“VERIS has longstanding reliability problems that continue to slow its processing speed during periods of peak usage,” the report continued.

The Voter Protection Corps, an advocacy group that seeks to ensure that eligible voters can cast a ballot and have it counted, also expressed concerns about VERIS, particularly in light of the commonwealth’s introduction of same-day voter registration this year.

“Voter registration databases are critical infrastructure on which the whole voting system runs and Virginia cannot go another federal election cycle without substantial upgrades,” a 2021 report from the group reads.

While Virginia officials intended to replace VERIS — a project estimated to cost at least $20 million — they have not made adequate headway in replacing the system in time for the 2022 elections. In May, The Washington Post reported that a contract had still not been awarded for a new system, which some had hoped would operate parallel to VERIS in this election cycle. The Youngkin administration blamed “mismanagement of deadlines” and called the project “critically behind schedule” at the time.

During weekends this summer, the administration also said it needed to take VERIS offline in order to update it with newly redrawn legislative districts. The system’s capacity to store maps data is limited, per the 2018 oversight report.

There is no evidence that the problems with VERIS have impacted voters’ ability to cast a ballot or the tallying of election results (local registrars, not state elections personnel, are responsible for the counting process, which happens on offline “optical-scan” machines that count paper ballots).

While the problems with VERIS have been well documented for years, political attention on elections has lately focused on disputes over “election integrity,” a Republican talking point rooted in the ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Youngkin has walked a complicated line on election issues, seeking to reassure Virginia voters of the security of the commonwealth’s elections infrastructure while also campaigning for out-of-state Republican candidates who are election deniers. Attorney General Jason Miyares recently announced a well-staffed new elections integrity unit, though instances of voter fraud in Virginia are almost nonexistent.

Youngkin has defended his administration’s focus on security as necessary to ensuring public confidence.

“Anything we can do to improve[the] process and to improve people’s faith and trust in that process is warranted,” Youngkin said during a visit to the Loudoun Elections office last month, where he watched and asked questions as staff tested the county’s ballot-counting machines.

But Democrats and left-leaning advocacy groups point out that concerns over public confidence in elections have only arisen in the wake of Republicans casting doubt on the system in the first place. In response to the formation of the election integrity unit, the Virginia NAACP criticized what they see as an outsize focus on election security and suggested Republican leaders in Richmond should focus energy instead on reducing voter suppression and increasing voter registrations and voter participation.

This story has been updated to add context from lawmakers.