From: "Rich Kulawiec" <rsk@gsp.org>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2020 11:58:23 AM
Subject: Re: Virginia voter registration down due to cable cut

On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 07:44:01PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 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.

One of those things is the chronic underfunding of the systems/personnel
involved.  (This isn't the case everywhere of course but it's the case in
a lot of places.)  This leads to operations that are working -- barely --
and thus not resistant to stress, outages, and mistakes.

We could argue that given the criticality of this particular function
that resources should be more generously allocated, but unfortunately
that's often an unsuccessful argument.

---rsk