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Florida voter site goes dark. Routine maintenance or suppression?

Florida voter site goes dark. Routine maintenance or suppression?

Florida's voter registration site went down over the weekend, angering Democrats prepping for a statewide voter registration drive.

Our Staff
By Our StaffSep 23, 2019
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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Florida's voter registration website went down over the weekend, angering Democrats who accused the state's Republican governor of voter suppression just days ahead of a national voter registration drive.

The website went down Friday night for "routine maintenance," the site said, and was online again Sunday.

Democrats said they beieved Gov. Ron DeSantis orchestrated the shutdown to interrupt plans to register voters over the weekend and ahead of Tuesday's National Voter Registration Day, the single largest campaign to register voters.

"Shuttering the online voter registration site for 'maintenance' as we kick off our largest voter registration week is the latest act of voter suppression from a governor who has doubled down on voter suppression tactics during his short tenure," said Terrie Rizzo, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.

A spokeswoman for the department that oversees Florida's elections said the scheduled maintenance was announced in advance, and was designed to provide increased security and ensure an expected surge in traffic during the registration drive.

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A better direction for democracy reform

Denver election judge Eric Cobb carefully looks over ballots as counting continued on Nov. 6. Voters in Colorado rejected a ranked choice voting and open primaries measure.

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A better direction for democracy reform

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

This is the conclusion of a two-part, post-election series addressing the questions of what happened, why, what does it mean and what did we learn? Read part one.

I think there is a better direction for reform than the ranked choice voting and open primary proposals that were defeated on Election Day: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.

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To-party doom loop
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America

Let’s make sense of the election results

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author of "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

Well, here are some of my takeaways from Election Day, and some other thoughts.

1. The two-party doom loop keeps getting doomier and loopier.

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Person voting in Denver

A proposal to institute ranked choice voting in Colorado was rejected by voters.

RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Despite setbacks, ranked choice voting will continue to grow

Mantell is director of communications for FairVote.

More than 3 million people across the nation voted for better elections through ranked choice voting on Election Day, as of current returns. Ranked choice voting is poised to win majority support in all five cities where it was on the ballot, most notably with an overwhelming win in Washington, D.C. – 73 percent to 27 percent.

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Electoral College map

It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.

Chessrat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.

Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.

It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.

Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.

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