Louisiana voter registration portal mysteriously shuts down on Registration Day
nola.com
nola.com
From Gerrymandering, Voter Database purges, Voter Suppression through closing polling places, making it hard or impossible to vote by mail.
All of it is intentional. And it won't change because those who are elected are the ones that set the rules.
Historically, you can’t cure fascism by voting, even in situations where the elections haven’t been compromised.
To say American elections are "compromised" is both a gross exaggeration and a Dunning-Krugeresque oversimplification. Gerrymandering is absolutely a problem and needs to be dealt with. It's the primary (no pun intended) reason for the polarization of our elected officials. Having a non-partisan commission determine districts would help, but how to appoint those officials is not a solved problem.
> you can’t cure fascism by voting
Perhaps advocating was the wrong word but I only see one way to interpret those two statements side-by-side.
https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/
If and when the time comes to take up violence against the state, you may rest assured that I will not be subtly implying it, I will be shouting it loudly.
Malice is in the eye of the beholder.
Is there any other way to take the comment in question?
At their outset, revolutions and [domestic] terrorism are usually indistinguishable. The American Revolution was certainly viewed as terrorism by the Crown, whether they had that word for it or not. History is written by the victors, and to a certain extent the worthiness of your cause is determined decades or centuries later by whether or not you were successful.
Could you show/explain what kind of data do we have on this? How sure are we of this result?
They try to suppress it because a lot of people do it. The fewer people who vote and their vote doesn’t match the person or group who remains in power, the less crowd control that needs to be carried out with troops and violence after the election, the fewer inconvenient facts about post-election violence that need to be explained away to the supportive base with narratives and lies. Even authoritarians don’t like spending money they don’t have to.
They also try to suppress protest groups of any kind directed at any branch of the state, economic privacy, obtaining arms, private communications systems, and any and all things that might pose any kind of threat, even if only one to their image of legitimacy (such as pepper spraying peaceful protesters if protests get too large).
The election outcome, if favorable to the violent dictatorship, will be publicized widely and attempts to dispute it shut down. If unfavorable, discredited and disregarded, and any protests against it swiftly and violently quashed.
> National Voter Registration Day is a movement to encourage people to register to vote on the fourth Tuesday of September during election years.
There's no way this was an honest mistake. Why schedule maintenance on the exact day you expect a lot of voters to want to use the site?
It's not always maintenance that this happens to. I once worked at a facility that couldn't be snow-plowed overnight because they couldn't ask maintenance to work late/early and they couldn't hire a 3rd party to do it because that violated the specific language in the contract of the government employees union that the maintenance dept belonged to.
Even if the other 60% regains control, isn't your society basically fucked anyway? Because you can never trust that 40% with any kind of power ever again.
Because the moment they would regain that power, they would try to forever cut you off from any power ever again.
You've got some small minority of people on both sides who want complete control as a means to their own ends and then the 80% in the middle who don't really care that much and will ally with either side depending on the other specifics of the situation.
I'm pulling the numbers out of my ass but pretty much every contentious issue breaks down this way. Most people mostly don't care about most things until you start getting really extreme.
From what I've seen, there's one party that has done more to disenfranchise voters and attack our democratic processes in the last year than I can remember in my entire lifetime. Attacking the postal service during a historic mail in election, inviting foreign influence into the election and directly soliciting it in exchange for military funding (and then getting impeached for it), the constant suggestions that the election is illegitimate so that he can scream and shout about it if he loses. The Trump reelection campaign (yes the political campaign itself, not even a neutral government entity) has also been litigating to make it harder to vote across the country.
At this point, coming to an article about a republican administration committing pretty clear voter suppression in the context of the past year of partisan voter suppression and saying "well actually, both sides are bad" is basically gaslighting. All sorts of voter suppression tactics like hardcore voter ID laws, purging the voting record (and "accidentally" getting rid of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters), poll taxes by proxy, and crazy voting deadlines, restricting resources for polling places, and making it harder to leave your job to go vote leans to one side of the aisle.
The however many % want their team to be in charge so they can rule the country to their liking, to overuse the f-word, a fascist state where police have impunity to do whatever they want. Or maybe call it a Mafia state, with the police, DHS and ICE being the henchmen, where someone can destroy a nature conservation area for oil, as long as he contributes to the senator's "reelection campaign" funds. Hah it's even okay to give Supreme Court justices weekend getaways, or to have their wife be a lobbyist.
Imagine having an army where, yeah, a high percentage is trying to sabotage the mission, even to their own detriment. Was the US ever a shining beacon of democracy, or was that all just a fairy tale?
I guess only small amount from those 40% are actively undemocratic and trying to brainwash the rest, by telling them that they're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires/senators/congressman, etc.", thus the system actually will benefit them, when it won't.
In this world it helps to be not only opinionated but violent and maybe a little unhinged. The more enthusiastic you are about conflict and the more damaging you are to others in conflict the more the conflict-avoidant majority around you will side with you to protect themselves. In other words, this is a world that favors bullies.
Sure it’s possible that this was a voter suppression attempt as I’m seeing in the comments. But much more likely they found a last minute bug that would have screwed them on Election Day, so they took the site down.
There are much more effective ways to stop people from voting. See https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/10/20/politics/gwinnett-county-...
Like Facebook, at some point organizations lose the benefit of the doubt.
Link: https://cyber.dhs.gov/ed/20-04/
From the article:
"Update all Windows Servers with the domain controller role by 11:59 PM EDT, Monday, September 21, 2020,
Apply the August 2020 Security Update to all Windows Servers with the domain controller role. If affected domain controllers cannot be updated, ensure they are removed from the network."
This is a bit of a red herring or just bad journalism.
The article (which has been updated but does not list that it was) the URL they pointed to, much like the original tweet that the article is based off of did not point to the geauxvote.com site, but to a static maintenance URL. (https://voterportal.sos.la.gov/Maintenance?areaName=Portal) which would lead people to believe it was down for much longer than it was, in fact the tweets this is based off of still would lead you to believe that.
In truth the site was down from 8pm to midnight on Tuesday, the site was operating normally for most of voter registration day.
Its not mysterious, its schedule maintenance, the system gets an influx of records from several state agencies to determine registration status, including the OMV for drivers records, DPS for prison records, etc.. All those records have to be processed, then pushed into the system. This isn't done on the weekends as the state doesn't push the information on the weekend, the records are pushed through out Monday, there is a small window for validation, and corrections, and the whole system is updated on Tuesday.
I mean I'm not saying that voter suppression isn't going on, I'm saying this as a method makes no sense.
If they wanted to actually suppress the vote, they could have just dropped the submissions, and before people talk about the improbability of that, the system is solely owned by the secretary of state, it was written for them by a 3rd party contract paid by them, and all the data is either in their physical building or on amazon aws that they control. There is no 3rd party audit controls to prevent tampering.
So if they wanted those registrations to go unregistered they don't need to put up a maintenance sign, where some twitter detective could foil figure it out. they could just not record them, or erase them, with no one being the wiser.
It's just a redirect anyways.
This may sound hyperbolic, but it's happened before. A man I knew many years ago told me how during the Vietnam war, he spent his weekends smuggling draft dodgers across the border in his boat. Poor kids who couldn't afford a doctor to say they have bone spurs. Political refugees, from a certain perspective.
Let's say Trump loses, but won't accept the results. Let's say he gets the military behind him. These aren't even far fetched ideas anymore. These are things that could happen. Violence would certainly follow.
Makes me think I should buy a boat.
First, the US needs mandatory voting. This is what Australia has. The argument against this has always been about uninformed people voting and "fraud". I used to be sympathetic to this argument until I saw the massive scale of voter suppression that occurs in the US.
Mandatory voting immediately changes the conversation from "How do we get our side to vote and the other side note to?" to the legal obligation officials have to ensuring everyone can vote.
Voting also happens on the weekend in Australia. This greatly simplifies finding polling places. Most of them are schools.
The other thing that Australia has that the US needs (which will never happen) is preferential voting.
A big mistake the US makes (IMHO) is how the election process itself is politicized. I mean who thought it was a good idea that election supervisors are an elected position?
In Australia, we have the Australian Electoral Commission, who is responsible for organizing elections, tallying and reporting the results and determining district boundaries. Somehow this manages to function without it being a partisan battleground.
The real problem here seems to be cultural. You have a conservative once-majority now-minority that seems to feel that the ends justify the means. I mean the level of hypocrisy here is truly jaw-dropping. Four years ago it was too contentious to hold hearings on a nominee 10 months before an election. Now? We may have a Supreme Court confirmation in a lame duck session.
Remember the outrage around Hilary's emails? Yet on Russian interference in the election? Nothing. No, that's "fake news".
And by any objective measure, Trump himself is a reprehensible human being, whether you agree with his politics or not.
How self-described "moral voters" can turn a blind eye to all this, basically "because abortion", is almost incomprehensible. I have to wonder if overturning Roe v. Wade might not be the best thing at this point. Two-thirds of the population live in states that will legalize it anyway and then this issue can stop being a rallying cry.
As for this effort, I don't actually believe it was organized this way from the top (ie White House, RNC). It's the sort of thing that really smells like some mid-level functionary and state politics wannabe acting on their own with something that ultimately probably won't matter but is great virtue signaling (for someone who wants endorsements and support for some later election).
Or it could be some partisan mid-level manager who acted on their own.
To anyone saying "no maintenance takes a day", I guarantee you it can. This could easily be a database server that is being replaced. It needs to be set up and the database copied over. Not everyone runs EC2 instances. In the real world deployments can be (and usually are) incredibly primitive.
Broad national-level statements like "election supervisors are an elected position" are almost always wrong for huge swaths of the country. Not a single election judge, election helper, or poll watcher (three distinct positions with distinct roles) in my entire state is elected. They're all volunteers, and with the exception of the poll watchers are almost always not elected in their day job.
You simply cannot make broad sweeping changes across the country to something like an election. It's controlled by every state individually. You can even see this in mail-in balloting where some states allow it, some don't, the dates are all different, etc. This is a pain is the ass but it's by design. The US was explicitly founded to not have a strong, centralized federal government. So that makes it very difficult to make huge changes like you're talking about.
Having contracted for a few state agencies myself, I agree with you maintenance can absolutely take a day. Typically it's one or two people responsible for the entire tear down and set-up, and if you have 9 hours to get it done there's little incentive to be super efficient about it. You'll take prod down at 8:01am and plan to bring it up around 4 to check for issues. Even if you're done by noon you may just wait.
I don't think the OP is ignorant of this, or not necessarily. I think they're saying we need federal standards for national elections, which would necessitate a constitutional amendment, sure. (Among the dubious features of our constitution is its amendment mechanism.)
While positions like a "County Supervisor of Elections" or a state supervisor might vary across the country. Some are directly elected, others are appointed but affirmed (as judges are in some jurisdictions) and others might be strictly appointed, the process is still political because redistricting is political. There's still a heavy political factor in US elections that doesn't seem to be the case anywhere else (that I've lived anyway).
How about 20 days? Apparently the site was down on the 3rd and won't be back until the 23rd, unless I read that wrong.
It's popular to decry corruption and then, in the same breath, say everyone is corrupt so best just lie back and take it.
Sounds like a succinct description of politics in the Boston-DC corridor to me.