RICHMOND, Va. (WDBJ7) The state’s online voter registration system crashed on Monday, preventing some Virginians from signing up in time for the November 8th election.

Now, voting rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit to force the state to extend the deadline.

It’s impossible to know how many people were affected, but the groups that filed the federal lawsuit believe there could be thousands of Virginians who were unable to register on Monday.

And they are asking a judge to extend the deadline by another 72 hours.

People who registered in person at the offices of local registrars on Monday, didn’t have a problem,

But some who tried to complete an online registration form were shut out of the system.

Arusha Gordon is with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“And they kept logging in trying to use the website and just kept getting an error message, or the website would crash,” Gordon told WDBJ7 in a telephone interview. “And so we were getting calls from voters who were frustrated and those continued until Monday afternoon when the website basically stopped working completely.”

The Department of Elections was already catching heat from state lawmakers before Monday’s problems, and the latest glitch has only added fuel to the fire.

And some local registrars say they are experiencing problems with the computer system. They say it’s taking much longer to process all of the voter registration applications, because the system is so slow.

Randy Wertz is the registrar in Montgomery County.

“Just consider if you take a minute and a half to 3 minutes for an application to cycle through,” Wertz said in a telephone interview, “it will take you quite a while to get through a thousand applications.”

The Department of Elections has blamed the large number of visitors to the website for the problems on Monday. We were unable to reach representatives of the agency Wednesday.

It’s unclear when a judge will consider the lawsuit, but it has to happen soon, because the election is now less than three weeks away.