Virginia voter registration down due to cable cut

Sat Oct 17 23:44:01 UTC 2020

To keep this on topic, no mention of any candidate or political party.

Networks can impact elections, and elections can impact network operators.

If @netblocks <www.netblocks.org> publishes a special report about your 
country's elections, that's a huge indicator of network (and election) 
problems.  In the 1950's, often the first indication something was 
happening was the national radio station in a country suddenly started 
playing uninterrupted classical music.  Now the modern equivalent is when 
mobile networks stop working and social media sites are blocked in a 
country.

There are many day-to-day causes of network problems.

I don't expect backhoes to stop cutting fiber cables on election day.

I don't expect network engineers to stop making mistakes on election day.

I don't expect software bugs to stop occurring on election day.

In the USA, absent clear and convincing evidence otherwise, I expect any 
outages will be due to the normal things that cause outages on election day.

If you do experience an outage, you probably want to have your P.R. people 
on call for a quicker than normal response.