In a Sunday article titled “Battleground state under fire for scheduling voter registration site to go dark same day as Butler rally,” Fox News reported that the entire universe revolves around the emotional needs of MAGA voters who responded to the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s decision to take the registration portal offline for maintenance in the hours after convicted felon former President Trump returned to the rally venue in which his face was almost blown off.
In case it were not already apparent, the logic internal to this normal function of any large organization’s IT department is that on a Saturday night – a time common sense dictates is when a government website would experience the lowest traffic and thus optimal for software engineers to conduct required maintenance – it was purposely timed to blunt any surge of new GOP registrations inspired by the Orange Satan’s hateful ranting and Elon Musk’s girlish jumping.
Fox News presents circumstantial evidence for what prompted the purported mass outrage against the entire Keystone in the form of Trump’s announcement that he would return to Butler on October 5th having predated the Secretary of State’s office placing a notice on the voter registration portal that it would be shut down the same evening. “The Pennsylvania Voter Registration website announced its scheduled maintenance sometime between Sept 30 to Oct 1, archived data for the site reviewed by Fox Digital shows,” they wrote, evidently proud of their “digital detective work.”
As for the assertion that Pennsylvania is indeed “under fire,” the article cites tweets by far-right activist Scott Presler, who in 2016 was fired from his job with the Virginia GOP for having sex with another man in the party’s offices and posting pics of it on Craigslist, and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, who wrote “Wow, they aren’t even trying to hide their blatant interference – appreciate you flagging, @scottpresler – @gop legal is on it and formally requesting the ‘system maintenance’ is moved to a different time,” and no other tweets.
“Archived records of the website show that Pennsylvania officials updated the page on Oct 3 – the same day Pressler and Lara Trump publicly posted about the timing of the maintenance – to reflect that the site would undergo maintenance at 10 pm to 4 am, instead of 6 pm until midnight,” Fox News writes. At no point does the article mention that last year the former president demanded that then-RNC chair Ronna Not-Romney sue to block the state of Pennsylvania from automatically registering voters every time they obtain or renew a driver’s license, a demand that went unheeded.
After the shift, Presler said he was still not “100 percent happy” and “It was clear that the Pennsylvania Department of State was engaging in election interference, trying to stop all of this national attention from translating into new voter registrations.” Thus the state remains under fire/