The nation's capital, of all places, is joining the roster of just nine states that don't have online voter registration.
The D.C. Board of Elections has pulled the plug on the app and online portal that allowed residents to register or update their voter information, saying the software had proved unreliable and had too many bugs to fix.
It's the second significant election snafu this month in Washington, where such snags receive outsized attention because so many policymakers and people in the political industry are among the 700,000 residents.
A questionnaire mailed two weeks ago — meant to smooth a November election planned for the first time to be almost entirely by mail because of the pandemic — had a design flaw rendering the collected data minimally useful. That prompted bipartisan skepticism about the city's competence to conduct elections after a June primary marred by some of the longest lines in the country and more than 1,000 lost applications for absentee ballots.
That confidence gap will only grow with the death of the Vote4DC system, which officials concede is not likely to be replaced by Nov. 3 because no vendor has been found and extensive testing of a new system would be required.
Residents can still register to vote by mail — or in person on Election Day or at an early voting site, hardly ideal during the Covid-19 outbreak. And so Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the committee that oversees the elections board, demanded Wednesday that a new app be "up and running" in time for the election.
There are not many hot local contests on the ballot, and the main interest is in whether Joe Biden will carry the District's 3 electoral votes with more than Hillary Clinton's 91 percent share four years ago.
"Either it wouldn't transmit information or it would go down, or it just wasn't doing the things that it was supposed to do," Board of Elections Chairman Michael Bennett told TV station WUSA in explaining the move. "The vendor wasn't able to make the corrections in a timely manner, so we just took it down rather than continue to have people use it and be confused."
Of 40,000 new or updated registrations last year in the fast-growing city, two in five were through the Vote4DC system. That's higher than the one-in-six estimated share in the 40 states that have embraced online registration as both the 21st century best practice and a cost-saver. (A Pew Charitable Trusts survey five years ago found that each registration on paper costs between 50 cents and $2.34 more to process than when done using the internet.)
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.