Narrative

“The voter registration system was taken down deliberately to stop people registering”

Registration deadlines produce enormous last-minute demand, and systems built for a steady load fail under it. The UK voter registration website collapsed hours before the June 2016 EU referendum deadline and the failure was widely read as an attack; the Electoral Commission found it was caused by exceptional demand, and Parliament legislated to extend the deadline in response. The pattern generalises: an outage at a deadline is the expected failure mode, and inferring intent from it requires evidence that is almost never offered.