Posted on 11/09/2012 3:43:19 PM PST by mojito
The Wednesday before the election, Mitt Romney sent a special message to volunteers about a special project his campaign was working on: “With state of the art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on election day.” What is it they say about something that sounds too good to be true? It probably is. That was the case with the Romney campaign’s “Project ORCA.”
The idea behind Project ORCA was simple, albeit far too complex in execution. Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way to track who had been to the polls in swing states, and who had not. It was the most complicated GOTV (get out the vote) effort in GOP history.
[....]
Starting in the early afternoon, reports were coming in from across swing states that ORCA had crashed. That morning, when Shoshanna [a GOTV volunteer] was on the phone with Boston, she was told the system was crashing, unable to withstand thousands of simultaneous log-ins. The system had never been stress tested and couldn’t handle the crush of traffic all at once. Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed. My source familiar with the campaign described it this way, “It was a giant [mess] because a political operative sold a broken product with no support or backup plan. Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign.”
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
LOL!!! ‘Whale FAIL’.
FUN FACT: Obama Lost in Every State with a Voter Photo-ID Law
What Luck! Obama Won Dozens of Cleveland Districts with 100% of the Vote
Good News: Obama Won County in Ohio with 108% Voter Registration
Colorado Counties Have More Voters Than People
Obama Got Over 99% of Vote Where Inspectors were Removed; Turnout Somehow "30%" Above Gov't Numbers
LOL, a computer crash is caused by arrogance? Talk about a non-sequitor. This guy is probably an Obama voter. I've never seen anything as arrogant as the Obama campaign as was easily seen in the last 2 presidential debates and the VP debate and in the low brow, low class tenor of Obama's "trash Romney at all cost" tactics. Anyone calling Romney's campaign arrogant with Obama being the most arrogant person on earth was clearly never with the Romney campaign to begin with. Probably a mole.
Good links. Thank you.
Regular old fashioned knocking on doors and phone banks are the way to go...
no technology needed...
a printout of voters can be got from the election commision...
You’re welcome. :-)
They had 30,000 eager volunteers sitting around ALL DAY with nothing to do...
what I would have done with that crowd...
doors to knock on...
phone banks and folks to call...
30,000 eagar beavers ???
with nothing to do ???
REALLY ???
That’s what we did in my county in Florida. We delivered the goods.
Willard was just an arrogent wuss...
he should have left off admiring his faded matinee idol “looks” in his mirror and got out and beat the bushes for voters like any one else...
But NOOOOOO Willard was too speshul too entitled...
and too durn big for his magik britches...
Whale fail
________________________________
Yeah this time Capn Ahab got Moby Dick...
:)
After the amount of time I and many others spent working on the Romney campaign (while holding my nose), this makes me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, the phrase ‘improvise adapt and overcome’ comes to mind.
Campaign managers dream...
I thought Chris Christie’s embrace of Obama was Project Orca.
Campaign managers dream...
First, higher tech does not always mean better. To me, a smart phone is a really poor input device for most people.
I had a similar issue years ago, my employer had a light pen for media buyers to select dayparts on a screen, and as the system was on just one PC, it was a bottleneck and the light pen was a pain. I reprogrammed the process to produce paper reports that could be passed out, filled out and returned, and I entered in the results, far faster than they could, and they spent more of their time doing their real jobs.
A better idea would be to have scannable paper lists where a bubble is marked when a voter shows up - and have enough copies for them to be picked up hourly. Runners could pick them up, and you would have distributed points where someone is in a car with a laptop, a scanner and wifi. Easy to fill out, and if one car's laptop or scanner fails, run to the nearest one after that. Security is also improved this way - the campaign would control the access points. In the end, IMO this would have produced more speed of remote info than ORCA, and far better reliability.
Second, there were so many basic systems mistakes here it makes me wonder if the people running this had any experience actually managing systems. It was insane to think that they could give people access the day of the election and everyone would automatically master the interface within ten minutes.
A better plan would be to have a beta site and have a Saturday where everyone could log in and do a dry run. First, you would be sure their COULD access it. Second, it would make them familiar with the interface before the election. And third, it would provide close to real-world load testing.
Third, this was top-down. I would imagine you had some know-it-all MBA hotshot running this who had conference calls with suck-ups, none of whom had the balls to ask what the **** is going on with this crazy implementation plan. Someone who has no understanding of the **** happens factor, which is always there. I once had an MBA berate me about preaching that **** happens, and asked me to give him an example in his project plan of such happening. I told him that if I could do that, it wouldn't be **** happens and it would be in the project plan. Sure enough, it came in late and over budget because of unexpected problems. Seasoned pros with some humility use planning, testing, time and budget cushions, more testing, user acceptance, more testing and them rollouts rife with contingencies to deal with the inevitable problems that come up.
The real problem with ORCA was that they didn't even spot the obvious problems in their plan that anyone with two years of experience with running systems could tell them were coming at them like a freight train. But, then again, this is coming from the same bunch who thinks RINOs make the best presidential candidates, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
Aren’t you supposed to be busy voting for the Queen? I’d have thought that gave you enough to do. How’d the GOTV for the Royals go last time around?
So I don't understand all the end-of-the world stuff about how we would have won if only the system had worked perfectly. Just call everyone that you don't have confirmation has voted. In fact, there can never be a perfect system, because as several people have pointed out on other threads, pollwatchers must sit where they are told which may be just too far to hear every name, or people speak too softly to be heard, or there are too many at once in a large precinct. AND where we live in West Virginia, it is impossible to have pollwatchers under state election law (the only state of 50 where this is true because of Democrat one-party rule).
So if Orca is the Beached Whale project, the GOTV calls just go out to more people anyway, right?
I am absolutely not defending the technical people involved nor agreeing it was designed well or should even have been nationally centralized, but thinking that had it worked as well as possible, it would merely change the number of outgoing GOTV computer-generated calls; unless someone explains what else would be the point.
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