The deadline for registering to vote in the EU referendum is to be extended to midnight on Thursday as Whitehall scrambles to recover from the collapse of a government website.
Ministers have been forced to make room in the parliamentary programme for emergency legislation which will allow tens of thousands of people to register following the website’s crash on Tuesday night, two hours short of the original deadline.
The government is expected to rush through legislation on Thursday to ensure that the collapse of the official registration portal does not disenfranchise tens of thousands of people ahead of what is expected to be a close contest.
Earlier, David Cameron told the House of Commons that the government would ensure that voters had a change to register for the referendum.
The development followed pressure from the elections watchdog and opposition politicians who called for the government to step in after the website’s collapse in the last two hours before Tuesday’s midnight registration deadline.
Political observers have said that many of those who could not register were younger voters who tend to support the remain camp.
Writing on Twitter, Matt Hancock, the Cabinet Office minister, said: “Due to technical problems with the website yesterday we’ll extend deadline to midnight tomorrow.”
Cameron earlier told the House of Commons: “People should continue to register today. The Electoral Commission has made a statement this morning urging the government to consider options that would effectively extend the deadline and these should include legislative options, and we are doing that.”
The shadow voter registration minister, Gloria De Piero, was granted an urgent question in the Commons on the issue.
In response, the Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock said the government was exploring whether it would need to introduce secondary legislation to extend the deadline for a short period.
“We are looking at legislation and possible secondary legislation … We have to get the details right as we will have to pass it at pace,” he said.
Hancock could not say how many people were unable to register but No 10 disclosed that 214,000 people tried to register between 9pm and 10pm on Tuesday.
Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative chair of the public administration and constitutional affairs committee and a leading leave campaigner, questioned whether there was time to introduce legislation.
“By law the register has to be finished six days before the date of the poll, there has to be a five-day period for objecting to any name on the register when it goes on, so that is 11 days.
“We are just about 11 days away from the referendum,” he said.
Doubts also remained over whether there would be an extension to the deadline for postal votes. The deadline for applying is Wednesday. But people can only apply if they are registered, De Piero said.
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and other opposition figures called for action after the Cabinet Office website would not allow voters to input their details at 10.40pm on Tuesday. Voters had been encouraged for weeks to register before 11.59pm to be able to take part in the EU referendum.
In an unusual intervention, the Electoral Commission on Wednesday urged the government to introduce legislation that would extend the deadline.
A commission spokesperson said: “There will be many people who wanted to register to vote last night and were not able to.
“We have said to the government this morning they should consider options for introducing legislation as soon as possible that would extend the deadline. We would support such a change.”
Cameron was among senior figures who urged people to sign up before the midnight deadline, but the last-minute rush was stalled when the website failed, with Corbyn and the Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, among those demanding an extension.
“Given the history of government IT problems, it is extraordinary that there were no contingency arrangements in place. Instead we have blind panic and chaos,” said Farron.
“It is legal to extend the deadline. There are a number of options the government can use. My sense is we should extend the deadline for anybody for another 24 hours.
“People might have seen the debate last night and wanted to register, that is valid. It seems many trying to register were young people. It would be a travesty if their first experience of democracy was this shambles.
“Evidence shows younger people are overwhelmingly pro-European, and if they are disenfranchised it could cost us our place in Europe. It could also turn them off democracy for life. Voters must be given an extra day while this mess is sorted out urgently.”
The Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, also appeared to agree that the voter registration deadline should be extended for a day.
“I think there have been some pretty big clarion calls for people to register and my understanding is that a very, very large number of people have. So if the website crashed last night then maybe the sensible thing is to extend it by a day but I really wouldn’t go beyond that,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
According to government data, more than 50,000 people attempted to register to vote between 11.15pm and 11.20pm on Tuesday.
A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said officials became aware of technical issues on gov.uk/register-to-vote late on Tuesday night owing to “unprecedented demand”.
“Some people did manage to get through and their applications were processed. We tried to resolve the situation as quickly as was possible and to resolve cases where people tried to register but were not able to,” she said.
Labour’s leader wrote:
I’m told https://t.co/qXdulxPFk2 site has crashed so people can’t register to vote for #EUreferendum. If so, deadline has to be extended
— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) June 7, 2016
Yvette Cooper, the former Labour minister, also called for the government to extend the deadline. “People cannot be denied the right to vote because computer says no,” she tweeted.
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