This goes all the way to the top. The US Department of Defence are clamping down on dissent. A group of Democrats set up a website to help with voter registrations including pointing to the official site. The Pentagon, which runs the site to help expats and military abroad vote, banned particular ISPs from getting access to the official site to prevent hacking. So now the Democrats are complaining and the Pentagon has told them to go away. It does seem perverse that an overseas voting site would be blocked at 27 ISPs (including Yahoo Japan, Wanadoo in France, Telefonica in Spanin and China Telecom) when there are cheap solutions to partition that server from the rest of the DoD.

However Pentagon spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke said the blocks were not related to the election nor designed to silence Democrat voting abroad. "It would stop the Republicans, too, right? It's both sides. We're not just letting a certain party through,'' Krenke said. So at least the Pentagon are even-handed in their disenfranchicement of US voters.