Comment by ceejayoz
3 days ago
> At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals.
Until 2013, some states were under Federal preclearance rules because those "totally different goals" were historically "don't let black people vote".
Yeah! And that's bad!
But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The malicious-officials problem has fixes like "vote people out" and "decommission harmful programs" and "restore cut funding".
The busted-data-system problem has fixes like "national ID card system" or "remove regulations preventing effective data sharing" or "hold system implementors responsible for failures".
If you see the disenfranchisement/conspiracy of the former in the bureaucratic/tech debt of the latter, you'll fix the wrong problems in the wrong ways, and make things worse.
> But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The problem is when "oops we did a little oopsiefuckup" starts to look like a deliberate pattern to cause chaos.