Louisiana voter registration portal mysteriously shuts down on Registration Day
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.