Forum Disruption During Special Election 5/18 - 5/19

Legal Code - Section 8.3: Forum Access:

9. The existence of widespread obstacles that impede access to the official forum of The North Pacific, including, but not limited to, Denial of Service attacks and prolonged server downtime, shall be considered an actual emergency, and does not require a declaration by the RA.
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12. The governmental authorities of the region are authorized to take any reasonable actions which they deem appropriate and which are consistent with the spirit and intent of regional laws to preserve the continuity of both community and government for the duration of the emergency.

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On 5/18, at 9:52 PM GMT, the forum's SSL certificate expired, causing a "Page could not be loaded" error for Chromium based browsers. This issue persisted for 16 hours, 10 minutes until the SSL certificate was renewed. Although there were workarounds available, such as not using a Chromium based browser (such as Firefox) or using incognito mode, this was a widespread disruption. The question on the table is whether this constituted a Forum Access Emergency under Section 8.3, Clause 9 of the Legal Code, and whether the voting period of the May 2022 Special Justice Election needs to be extended, with LC 8.3.12 being our justification, as voting is supposed to last for five days. I don't see the fact that being able to submit a ballot now, before the five days is up, is sufficient to say that voting lasted five days, considering that the Regional Assembly extends voting whenever voting is closed for any reason, such as for Memorial Days.

An extension of equal time would mean that the voting period would end on Sunday, May 22 at 8:40 PM GMT.

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Reminder: @Gorundu, you are absent, as you are a candidate in the ongoing election. Absent Election Commissioners may not supervise an election or participate in any decisions made by the Election Commission as a whole.

I would agree with extending the election time. Seems very much within the spirit and intent of our election laws that people should be able to submit votes for five days.

Full support on the motion to extend votes.

It is only fair that the full amount of alloted voting time is to be granted. I support this call.

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I agree wholeheartedly. We should extend the election.

Full support extended the voting period.

I believe we have consensus then. The OP of the voting thread has been updated to reflect the new stop time.