15 ms·

Louisiana voter registration portal mysteriously shuts down on Registration Day

106 points by tertiary 6y ago

Jonnax 6y ago
America has corrupt elections. 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.
- sneak 6y ago
  It can absolutely change if those who are elected are physically removed from their rule-setting positions by the disenfranchised. Historically, you can’t cure fascism by voting, even in situations where the elections haven’t been compromised.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Just to be clear, you are advocating removing government officials by violent means? Please explain the difference between that and domestic terrorism. 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.
    - sneak 6y ago
      My comment didn’t advocate for anything; I am not sure where you got that from.
      - pc86 6y ago
        > if those who are elected are physically removed from their rule-setting positions > 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.
        sneak 6y ago
        It seems common for Americans to read or hear statements, infer an unsaid statement X, and then assume X was the thing explicitly being communicated by the speaker, even though X was never said, which then elevates X higher than any other thing that was actually said. It seems to happen automatically and without conscious decision to do so. I’ve written about it before. You should probably be aware of this habit/bias, because I think you may have just performed it. https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/ 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.
        piva00 6y ago
        You are building a strawman, the observation from OP in no way condones any violent attitude. It is a historical fact that authoritarianism in general (monarchies, despots and so on) has only been brought down through violence, the comment you are replying does not advocate or imply that, you are the one reading that. Malice is in the eye of the beholder.
        pc86 6y ago
        I'm not building a strawman (at least not intentionally!), and I don't mean to imply malice. Believing in violent overthrow of a tyrannical government is a perfectly logical belief, albeit one that will get you in trouble with said government. For most people, there is a point at which they would take up arms against their own government. That in and of itself isn't a bad thing. Is there any other way to take the comment in question?
        piva00 6y ago
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      You raise an interesting point: How would you differentiate revolution against a fascist government from terrorism?
      - pc86 6y ago
        mlonkibjuyhv has it exactly right, I think. 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.
        Schiendelman 6y ago
        That makes sense. In that case, then, is saying something 'is domestic terrorism' the right test of whether it's the right thing to do? It sounds to me like if you used that gauge you'd never overthrow a fascist government.
    - mlonkibjuyhv 6y ago
      Well that is easy. If you succeed it is a violent revolution, if you fail it is domestic terrorism. Nothing new here.
  - pas 6y ago
    > Historically, you can’t cure fascism by voting, even in situations where the elections haven’t been compromised. Could you show/explain what kind of data do we have on this? How sure are we of this result?
  - Grue3 6y ago
    If voting doesn't matter, why do authoritarian governments try so damn hard to suppress it? Riddle me this.
    - sneak 6y ago
      The appearance of legitimacy helps dictatorial regimes a lot. 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.
coldcode 6y ago
Nothing mysterious about it. Pull the plug, wait 24 hours...
louwrentius 6y ago
Imagine you live in a country where about 40% of the population wants to destroy democracy. 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.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  40% wants to destroy democracy, always demonizes the 60% as sub-human violent scum, and has been stockpiling guns and ammo for decades. And the 40% has violent fantasies of a Civil War do-over. And is enthusiastically receiving active support from foreign powers who would love to see the country descend into bloody chaos.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    And the other 60% is not doing basically the same? > 40% always demonizes the 60% as sub-human violent scum One sentence later... > 40% has violent fantasies of a Civil War do-over
    - Swenrekcah 6y ago
      It's probably not true that all Trump supporters want a civil war, but to me it seems true that most/all of Trump's and the enabling Republicans actions are leading their country to either civil war or Putin-style autocracy. So why anyone would still be a supporter is beyond me. I'm a European who has been watching the last four years first in disbelief, then in optimism, then in pessimism and now in horror.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        > It's probably not true that all Trump supporters want a civil war Probably? Dude. Don’t be ridiculous. Exactly this kind of demonization of the opposing political party is causing so many problems today.
shrubble 6y ago
Louisiana politics has been corrupt for the entirety of the lifetime of anyone who is alive. That it has become a bipartisan effort is not shocking.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  But what is bipartisan about this particular effort? It's popular to decry corruption and then, in the same breath, say everyone is corrupt so best just lie back and take it.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >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.
- Axsuul 6y ago
  Please put me in my place if I'm wrong here, but isn't it typically the Democrats who have the most to gain with more people voting (e.g. young people more likely to be liberal but less likely to vote)?
  - pc86 6y ago
    It depends on the area. In general yes you're right but you could absolutely find a lot of areas where increased voter turnout corresponds to increased Republican votes.
  - soco 6y ago
    I believe the COUNTRY has the most to gain if more people are voting, whatever that party was.
    - Axsuul 6y ago
      I agree but what I'm saying is the incentive for being bi-partisan is less so.
mcv 6y ago
> The explanation given is that the portal needs to undergo "scheduled maintenance” that is “required.” > 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?
- millzlane 6y ago
  Scheduled maintenance during business hours?
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I've seen it a lot with government. Usually happens because the sum of contracts signed with the unions over the years results in them not being able to ask employees to work substantially outside normal business hours in the capacity required to perform the maintenance. Since government has a monopoly on the service upper management doesn't worry about losing customers and pissing everyone off with daytime maintenance. So even if all the line level bureaucrats and their direct managers would rather the service be up and don't mine staying late one day to do it it may still get done during business hours because sucking it up is less of a pain than burning political capital trying to get an exception. Sure the people who actually work on the service want the thing they're responsible for to be up but it's just not worth the fight a lot of the time. 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.
  - Meph504 6y ago
    8pm to midnight is business hours ?
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  I wonder if scheduled in this case means recurrent maintenance. That would be easy to prove or disprove.
ChadTheNomad 6y ago
They really wanted people to register with that domain...
- tgb 6y ago
  Apparently "Geaux" is the local slang for their sports teams, plus the pun with "Go vote". So it's pretty reasonable in my opinion.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    The mobile app goes by the same name.
  - rascul 6y ago
    It's a Cajun thing, and popular in sports from the area. Geaux means go.
- sjs382 6y ago
  "Geaux" is regional slang for "Go". See the second paragraph under "Modern Usage": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Suffix_-eaux https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Suffix_-eaux It's just a redirect anyways.
gordondavidf 6y ago
I work in election night reporting. While it’s easy to assume malice, so often it’s just that election officials haven’t entirely thought things through. It’s not an easy job and in the past 4 years, positions no one has cared about are being scrutinized by the whole US and election technical teams now have to worry about election interference from foreign governments. And all of their work comes down to one day where anything that can go wrong does. 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-absentee-ballots/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/10/20/politics/gwinnett-county-...
- Swenrekcah 6y ago
  Hopefully it's not malice. But then it needs to be communicated. If the issue is a bug that needs fixing, say so. Don't say scheduled maintainance if it isn't. Like Facebook, at some point organizations lose the benefit of the doubt.
mabbo 6y ago
As a Canadian, I begin to wonder how much more America can take before it fails and we're dealing with refugees. 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.
cletus 6y ago
As an Australian who lives in the US, the vast chasm between how elections work in the two countries still boggles my mind. 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.
selimthegrim 6y ago
Note also the story was broken by the Gambit alternative weekly and WDSU (the latter a TV station so gullible they were pranked by a Facebook post into announcing a nonexistent second line for RBG), not the Advocate/Nola.com (hulking right wing wreck of the former Times-Picayune run out of Baton Rouge)
selebrazin 6y ago
While the timing of the shutdown is indeed peculiar if not outright suspicious, I wonder if the "scheduled maintenance" part had something to do with the Emergency Directive 20-04 which was released by the Department of Homeland Security on September 18. It requires all federal agencies to apply a patch to mitigate the newest Windows vulnerability CVE-2020-1472, dubbed Zerologon. Link: https://cyber.dhs.gov/ed/20-04/ 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."
Meph504 6y ago
Full disclosure, I haven't worked on this system in many years, but I did work on it. 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 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.

106 points by tertiary 6y ago

America has corrupt elections. 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.

sneak 6y ago
It can absolutely change if those who are elected are physically removed from their rule-setting positions by the disenfranchised. Historically, you can’t cure fascism by voting, even in situations where the elections haven’t been compromised.
- pc86 6y ago
  Just to be clear, you are advocating removing government officials by violent means? Please explain the difference between that and domestic terrorism. 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.
  - sneak 6y ago
    My comment didn’t advocate for anything; I am not sure where you got that from.
    - pc86 6y ago
      > if those who are elected are physically removed from their rule-setting positions > 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.
      - sneak 6y ago
        It seems common for Americans to read or hear statements, infer an unsaid statement X, and then assume X was the thing explicitly being communicated by the speaker, even though X was never said, which then elevates X higher than any other thing that was actually said. It seems to happen automatically and without conscious decision to do so. I’ve written about it before. You should probably be aware of this habit/bias, because I think you may have just performed it. https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/ 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.
      - piva00 6y ago
        You are building a strawman, the observation from OP in no way condones any violent attitude. It is a historical fact that authoritarianism in general (monarchies, despots and so on) has only been brought down through violence, the comment you are replying does not advocate or imply that, you are the one reading that. Malice is in the eye of the beholder.
        pc86 6y ago
        I'm not building a strawman (at least not intentionally!), and I don't mean to imply malice. Believing in violent overthrow of a tyrannical government is a perfectly logical belief, albeit one that will get you in trouble with said government. For most people, there is a point at which they would take up arms against their own government. That in and of itself isn't a bad thing. Is there any other way to take the comment in question?
        piva00 6y ago
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    You raise an interesting point: How would you differentiate revolution against a fascist government from terrorism?
    - pc86 6y ago
      mlonkibjuyhv has it exactly right, I think. 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.
      - Schiendelman 6y ago
        That makes sense. In that case, then, is saying something 'is domestic terrorism' the right test of whether it's the right thing to do? It sounds to me like if you used that gauge you'd never overthrow a fascist government.
  - mlonkibjuyhv 6y ago
    Well that is easy. If you succeed it is a violent revolution, if you fail it is domestic terrorism. Nothing new here.
- pas 6y ago
  > Historically, you can’t cure fascism by voting, even in situations where the elections haven’t been compromised. Could you show/explain what kind of data do we have on this? How sure are we of this result?
- Grue3 6y ago
  If voting doesn't matter, why do authoritarian governments try so damn hard to suppress it? Riddle me this.
  - sneak 6y ago
    The appearance of legitimacy helps dictatorial regimes a lot. 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.

coldcode 6y ago

Nothing mysterious about it. Pull the plug, wait 24 hours...

louwrentius 6y ago

Imagine you live in a country where about 40% of the population wants to destroy democracy. 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.

DFHippie 6y ago
40% wants to destroy democracy, always demonizes the 60% as sub-human violent scum, and has been stockpiling guns and ammo for decades. And the 40% has violent fantasies of a Civil War do-over. And is enthusiastically receiving active support from foreign powers who would love to see the country descend into bloody chaos.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  And the other 60% is not doing basically the same? > 40% always demonizes the 60% as sub-human violent scum One sentence later... > 40% has violent fantasies of a Civil War do-over
  - Swenrekcah 6y ago
    It's probably not true that all Trump supporters want a civil war, but to me it seems true that most/all of Trump's and the enabling Republicans actions are leading their country to either civil war or Putin-style autocracy. So why anyone would still be a supporter is beyond me. I'm a European who has been watching the last four years first in disbelief, then in optimism, then in pessimism and now in horror.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      > It's probably not true that all Trump supporters want a civil war Probably? Dude. Don’t be ridiculous. Exactly this kind of demonization of the opposing political party is causing so many problems today.

shrubble 6y ago

Louisiana politics has been corrupt for the entirety of the lifetime of anyone who is alive. That it has become a bipartisan effort is not shocking.

DFHippie 6y ago
But what is bipartisan about this particular effort? It's popular to decry corruption and then, in the same breath, say everyone is corrupt so best just lie back and take it.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >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.
Axsuul 6y ago
Please put me in my place if I'm wrong here, but isn't it typically the Democrats who have the most to gain with more people voting (e.g. young people more likely to be liberal but less likely to vote)?
- pc86 6y ago
  It depends on the area. In general yes you're right but you could absolutely find a lot of areas where increased voter turnout corresponds to increased Republican votes.
- soco 6y ago
  I believe the COUNTRY has the most to gain if more people are voting, whatever that party was.
  - Axsuul 6y ago
    I agree but what I'm saying is the incentive for being bi-partisan is less so.

mcv 6y ago

> The explanation given is that the portal needs to undergo "scheduled maintenance” that is “required.” > 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?

millzlane 6y ago
Scheduled maintenance during business hours?
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I've seen it a lot with government. Usually happens because the sum of contracts signed with the unions over the years results in them not being able to ask employees to work substantially outside normal business hours in the capacity required to perform the maintenance. Since government has a monopoly on the service upper management doesn't worry about losing customers and pissing everyone off with daytime maintenance. So even if all the line level bureaucrats and their direct managers would rather the service be up and don't mine staying late one day to do it it may still get done during business hours because sucking it up is less of a pain than burning political capital trying to get an exception. Sure the people who actually work on the service want the thing they're responsible for to be up but it's just not worth the fight a lot of the time. 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.
- Meph504 6y ago
  8pm to midnight is business hours ?
jhanschoo 6y ago
I wonder if scheduled in this case means recurrent maintenance. That would be easy to prove or disprove.

ChadTheNomad 6y ago

They really wanted people to register with that domain...

tgb 6y ago
Apparently "Geaux" is the local slang for their sports teams, plus the pun with "Go vote". So it's pretty reasonable in my opinion.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  The mobile app goes by the same name.
- rascul 6y ago
  It's a Cajun thing, and popular in sports from the area. Geaux means go.
sjs382 6y ago
"Geaux" is regional slang for "Go". See the second paragraph under "Modern Usage": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Suffix_-eaux https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Suffix_-eaux It's just a redirect anyways.

gordondavidf 6y ago

I work in election night reporting. While it’s easy to assume malice, so often it’s just that election officials haven’t entirely thought things through. It’s not an easy job and in the past 4 years, positions no one has cared about are being scrutinized by the whole US and election technical teams now have to worry about election interference from foreign governments. And all of their work comes down to one day where anything that can go wrong does. 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-absentee-ballots/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/10/20/politics/gwinnett-county-...

Swenrekcah 6y ago
Hopefully it's not malice. But then it needs to be communicated. If the issue is a bug that needs fixing, say so. Don't say scheduled maintainance if it isn't. Like Facebook, at some point organizations lose the benefit of the doubt.

mabbo 6y ago

As a Canadian, I begin to wonder how much more America can take before it fails and we're dealing with refugees. 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.

cletus 6y ago

As an Australian who lives in the US, the vast chasm between how elections work in the two countries still boggles my mind. 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.

selimthegrim 6y ago

Note also the story was broken by the Gambit alternative weekly and WDSU (the latter a TV station so gullible they were pranked by a Facebook post into announcing a nonexistent second line for RBG), not the Advocate/Nola.com (hulking right wing wreck of the former Times-Picayune run out of Baton Rouge)

selebrazin 6y ago

While the timing of the shutdown is indeed peculiar if not outright suspicious, I wonder if the "scheduled maintenance" part had something to do with the Emergency Directive 20-04 which was released by the Department of Homeland Security on September 18. It requires all federal agencies to apply a patch to mitigate the newest Windows vulnerability CVE-2020-1472, dubbed Zerologon. Link: https://cyber.dhs.gov/ed/20-04/ 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."

Meph504 6y ago

Full disclosure, I haven't worked on this system in many years, but I did work on it. 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 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.