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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's just another cynical "both sides are bad" argument. Judge the parties by their actions, not some vague handwaving about the Pareto principle and that all politics is corrupt.
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.
I don't think that this is true anymore. Trump is moving the Overton Window to the right [1], while a part of the Democrats, lead by Bernie Sanders and other left politicians are trying to pull it to the left. So right now, a lot of people are travelling from the center of the Overton window to the sides. This also leads to more "political fights" and political tribalism.
What statement in the above isn't true (other than the numbers of course). "Most people don't care about most things, most of the time" seems pretty apt, especially for national politics.
I would like to optimistically believe that from that 40%, most of them (80% ?) do not know any better, or in some kind of cognitive dissonance. I imagine, they're thinking something along "we are a country of freedom, we help install democracy in the world, this is the system founding fathers created so it cannot be undemocratic, is it?".
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.
I think most people, in both the 40% and the 60%, avoid involving themselves in or thinking about politics as much as possible. They are conflict avoidant. They just want to get along and their approach to unpleasant truths is to think about something else. They vote as they do not out of any conviction but to avoid conflict with their less conflict-avoidant neighbors and relations.
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.
This is the real problem innit? Like I've been saying: Trump will go away in 4 to 8 years regardless; but his voting base will remain. I don't think Trump is the last President of his kind the US has seen, but I sure as hell hope I'm wrong on that.
Do you genuinely believe that a full 40% of Americans have "violent fantasies of a Civil War", or that legitimately want to "destroy democracy"? Have you met a single person in real life that thinks that way? Or have you only seen retweets and characterizations of a couple people online and have associated that with large swathes of the population?
> always demonizes the 60% as sub-human violent scum
> the 40% has violent fantasies
You have to see the irony here, right? You are doing more than your fair share of demonizing.
For a little perspective, only ~ 40% of people vote in presidential elections (and ~half vote democrat). So your percentages are way off from the start. Even among those that do vote, there are a huge portion of people who "don't really follow politics". The reality is much closer to 5% galvanized left vs 5% galvanized right, 90% people who don't really participate.
Perpetuating hate and division does nothing to help anyone.
> Have you met a single person in real life that thinks that way?
Not the OP but yes. Can't speak to any percentages but I do personally know two people who have been vocally advocating for civil war to "wipe out the left" for years now. Both are successful very wealthy entrepreneurs in CA.
You should compare the antifa vs. fa fatality count sometime. It would put the "both sides are equally violent" hypothesis into some perspective. Or guns and ammo count.
If you count WW2 in, sure, but nowadays? I think very few of even the most extremist people on either side will murder for their convictions. If we’re talking political violence, we should focus on counting stuff like beatings, arson, even people getting canceled, because it usually doesn’t manifest in killings.
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.
I am talking about Republicans as in the party officials, not regular people.
They could have investigated in good faith and taken action against Russian meddling. They could have blocked appointments of obvious partisan hacks like Barr and Kavanaugh. They could have cared about Trump not using the US foreign service and policy to line his own pockets.
They could have called out and condemned Trump's pandering to the racists in his base. The bar was not high but they have completely failed it.
When Trump took office, I genuinly believed Congress and the Republican party would keep him in check. Unfortunately the rot was too deep.
From what I gather of the current riots, everyone has failed in containing the spread and damage. But still there, Trump insists on pouring gasoline on a fire, by visiting the sites knowingly provoking more unrest.
A statesman would address the nation with grace, send someone else to sensitive sites, but he thrives on the chaos.
Well the obvious hipocrasy of the republicans with respect to the appointment of a supreme Court judge in an election year really does not lead to increase people trust in democracy. I encourage you to listen to the talks by republican senators when they blocked Obama from appointing a new Supreme Court judge 9 month before the election and how they are talking now (less then 3 months before an election).
Particularly damning are lindsey graham's statements, he literally said as late as 2016 supreme court judges should not be appointed in an election year, we (as republicans) will not do it. You can hold my words against me. And now he supports Trump appointing a new judge. The blatant disregard for any accountability, not calling out (and support) of corruption and fascist rhetoric from trump certainly undermines democracy, if it will lead to civil war is a different question. However the rethoric from some parts of the republican party are definitely going in that direction. Hell some parts are actively supporting qanon.
That's fair. It's definitely not true. I considered changing the words but decided to keep probably since it is after all a more accurate statement (being a weaker assertion) and partly because it's more damning of his supporters I admit.
"Destroy democracy" just sounds too abstract to make it scary.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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."
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) 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.
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.
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.
In general this shows a lack of understanding of the US system of government common to folks not from here (and honestly to at least half the people who were born here).
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.
> 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.
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.)
This is sort of my point. Technically it's not a national election, it's 50 state-wide elections. Each individual state's Department of State can prescribe most of the manner in which the election is handled. The electoral power starts and ends at the state level, and Constitutionally speaking, the fact that the state count is part of a national election is merely a byproduct of that.
> Broad national-level statements like "election supervisors are an elected position" are almost always wrong for huge swaths of the country
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).
> 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.
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.
> But unregistered voters and those seeking to update addresses or request absentee ballots in time for the Nov. 3 election are currently unable to access the portal until Wednesday, Sept. 23 at midnight, according to a statement on the otherwise inaccessible website.
This is the text of the article as of now. Though I see now it's 21 days, not 20.
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)
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)?
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.
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.