An inside look behind Romney's loss: An epic failure of its Orca big-data app

Computer World ^ | November 09, 2012 | Preston Gralla

[COUNTrecount]

Many things went wrong with Romney's campaign for president, but one of the biggest was the epic failure of the campaign's big-data app for getting out the vote, called Orca. When the campaign needed it most, Orca was beached.

Politico has an excellent summary of the problems it says that Orca had. Among them were that the Romney campaign kept it secret and didn't beta-test it before it was rolled out on Election Day. That meant that the people who it was designed for -- the thousands of volunteers across the country -- didn't have a chance to learn how to use it before it was launched. And Orca kept crashing throughout the day.

The system was designed to identify likely Romney voters who had not yet voted on Election Day, and then get them to vote. But it continually crashed and people didn't know how to use it. Here's what Politico has to say about the consequences:

The numbers in the interface never moved, leaving officials in Boston and out in the states "flying blind" -- a phrase used by several people. The workers on the ground didn't know what doors to knock on or what efforts to make with which voter targets who had not yet turned out --- some efforts were made but they were slow and more cumbersome. And the campaign officials also generally didn't know which precincts to send auto-calls into to try to boost turnout -- especially in precincts in Ohio, where there is no party affiliation in the general election. Instead of targeted information, all they really had to work with was the generic raw vote tallies in various counties.

[COUNTrecount]

"So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.

"The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."

[Perdogg]

How many times is this going to be posted?

[HarleyD]

Yeah, what Romney failed to do in his statistics was to factor in all the illegal votes.

[Idaho_Cowboy]

"The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."

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Sounds like standard m-o for a corporate businessman. Not saying I have a problem with business experience, but it's worth noting here.

[COUNTrecount]

Does SEARCH work for you?

It doesn’t work for me.

[The Sons of Liberty]

I’ve been in IT over twenty five years and it is inevitable that the system will always crash at the worst possible time and you must TEST, TEST, TEST and re-TEST. As for me, I always have an old fashioned method as a fallback. Paper and pencil are slower, but much more reliable.

[rightwingintelligentsia]

Hasn’t worked for me for several days.

[dfwgator]

So two whales doomed Romney, ORCA and Christie.

[jennychase]

Meg Whitman also tried same software and same approach and she also failed.
Main problem is GOTV. Obama campaign use census data and voted absentee for those who avoid voting and rest showed up.

GOP trust machine interaction than combination. They should increase registration and change RNC chairman.

[Paleo Conservative]

"The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."

Idaho_Cowboy:
Sounds like standard m-o for a corporate businessman. Not saying I have a problem with business experience, but it's worth noting here.

It's crazy to try to implement such a big software system without testing and without having an alternate system running as a backup. Didn't anyone learn anything from the IRS fiasco a few years ago when they unplugged their legacy software and switched to a new system in order to save money?

From what I've read about ORCA, it would have been illegal in Texas. In Texas it is illegal to transmit information about who has and hasn't voted to people outside the voting precinct. Also, it is illegal to use any electronic communications device inside a polling place.

[Tennessee Nana]

Romney's loss: An epic failure of its Orca big-data app

[Tennessee Nana]

LOL

[greyfoxx39]

Romney's loss: An epic failure of its Orca big-data app

Mitt's campaign was overloaded with BYU deegrees. I guess all those "speshul" BYU tech degrees that engineered this program should have been replaced with MIT degrees.

You'd think a former governor of MA would have considered this.

[Tennessee Nana]

Overloaded with “brains”

No common sense...

[Randy Larsen]

This is the first time I’ve seen it so back off!

[Perdogg]

or what??

[The Wizard]

this election was stolen by “vote siphoning” changing votes foe Romney into bama vote....and that’s what happened

[sergeantdave]

“but one of the biggest was the epic failure of the campaign’s big-data app for getting out the vote, called Orca. “

Let’s stop the crap. Romney lost because Buckwheat’s lying, cheating, vote-stealing machine was very good.

This stupid story is nothing more than disinformation to throw us off the track. So let’s deposit it in the trash can where it belongs.