Louisiana voter registration portal mysteriously shuts down on Registration Day

America has corrupt elections.<p>From Gerrymandering, Voter Database purges, Voter Suppression through closing polling places, making it hard or impossible to vote by mail.<p>All of it is intentional. And it won&#x27;t change because those who are elected are the ones that set the rules.

&gt; <i>The explanation given is that the portal needs to undergo &quot;scheduled maintenance” that is “required.”</i><p>&gt; <i>National Voter Registration Day is a movement to encourage people to register to vote on the fourth Tuesday of September during election years.</i><p>There&#x27;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?

Imagine you live in a country where about 40% of the population wants to destroy democracy.<p>Even if the other 60% regains control, isn&#x27;t your society basically fucked anyway? Because you can never trust that 40% with any kind of power ever again.<p>Because the moment they would regain that power, they would try to forever cut you off from any power ever again.

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.<p>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.<p>There are much more effective ways to stop people from voting. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amp.cnn.com&#x2F;cnn&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;20&#x2F;politics&#x2F;gwinnett-county-absentee-ballots&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amp.cnn.com&#x2F;cnn&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;20&#x2F;politics&#x2F;gwinnett-county-...</a>

While the timing of the shutdown is indeed peculiar if not outright suspicious, I wonder if the &quot;scheduled maintenance&quot; 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.<p>Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyber.dhs.gov&#x2F;ed&#x2F;20-04&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyber.dhs.gov&#x2F;ed&#x2F;20-04&#x2F;</a><p>From the article:<p>&quot;Update all Windows Servers with the domain controller role by 11:59 PM EDT, Monday, September 21, 2020,<p>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.&quot;

Full disclosure, I haven&#x27;t worked on this system in many years, but I did work on it.<p>This is a bit of a red herring or just bad journalism.<p>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. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voterportal.sos.la.gov&#x2F;Maintenance?areaName=Portal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voterportal.sos.la.gov&#x2F;Maintenance?areaName=Portal</a>) 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.<p>In truth the site was down from 8pm to midnight on Tuesday, the site was operating normally for most of voter registration day.<p>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&#x27;t done on the weekends as the state doesn&#x27;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.<p>I mean I&#x27;m not saying that voter suppression isn&#x27;t going on, I&#x27;m saying this as a method makes no sense.<p>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.<p>So if they wanted those registrations to go unregistered they don&#x27;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.

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

As a Canadian, I begin to wonder how much more America can take before it fails and we&#x27;re dealing with refugees.<p>This may sound hyperbolic, but it&#x27;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&#x27;t afford a doctor to say they have bone spurs. Political refugees, from a certain perspective.<p>Let&#x27;s say Trump loses, but won&#x27;t accept the results. Let&#x27;s say he gets the military behind him. These aren&#x27;t even far fetched ideas anymore. These are things that could happen. Violence would certainly follow.<p>Makes me think I should buy a boat.

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

As an Australian who lives in the US, the vast chasm between how elections work in the two countries still boggles my mind.<p>First, the US needs mandatory voting. This is what Australia has. The argument against this has always been about uninformed people voting and &quot;fraud&quot;. I used to be sympathetic to this argument until I saw the massive scale of voter suppression that occurs in the US.<p>Mandatory voting immediately changes the conversation from &quot;How do we get our side to vote and the other side note to?&quot; to the legal obligation officials have to ensuring everyone can vote.<p>Voting also happens on the weekend in Australia. This greatly simplifies finding polling places. Most of them are schools.<p>The other thing that Australia has that the US needs (which will never happen) is preferential voting.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Remember the outrage around Hilary&#x27;s emails? Yet on Russian interference in the election? Nothing. No, that&#x27;s &quot;fake news&quot;.<p>And by any objective measure, Trump himself is a reprehensible human being, whether you agree with his politics or not.<p>How self-described &quot;moral voters&quot; can turn a blind eye to all this, basically &quot;because abortion&quot;, 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.<p>As for this effort, I don&#x27;t actually believe it was organized this way from the top (ie White House, RNC). It&#x27;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&#x27;t matter but is great virtue signaling (for someone who wants endorsements and support for some later election).<p>Or it could be some partisan mid-level manager who acted on their own.<p>To anyone saying &quot;no maintenance takes a day&quot;, 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.

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&#x2F;Nola.com (hulking right wing wreck of the former Times-Picayune run out of Baton Rouge)

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.