I'm researching the California election. There are two candidates for Secretary of State, the incumbent and the challenger. The challenger wants me to know that California elections are in sorry shape. That's surprising to me, but his web site has a link to a study, cool! Except that when I click the link, I just go to a page that sits there failing to load. It shows a cute loading animation forever. When I peek at the programmer-debug view, I can see the problem: this secure https page is trying to load something from an insecure http link. Back in the naive old days when we didn't think we needed to worry about such things, web browsers would totally let a page do that, but nowadays they balk. So I guess that study worked, back in the day, but nowadays it's broken.
Which reveals out the real problem with citing that study: It's from 2014, before the incumbent took office. (I mean I guess it's that old based on the "2014" in its URI web address thingy. I can't tell from looking at the study itself because of course the study doesn't load…)
Cool cool cool this is going quicker than I thought. A mere two paragraphs of reading and clicking one link to figure out this guy is a goofus who shouldn't have got anywhere near state office. How did this jerk make it past the primary?
