[Intolerant in NJ]

Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way to track who had been to the polls in swing states, and who had not...back in the day we always got a call from the local GOP reminding us to go vote - whether we had already voted or not - nothing wrong with that approach - I worked the polls one November trying to track who had voted and who hadn't so those who hadn't could be contacted - it soon became a hopelss task - simply making sure all registered Republicans receive at least one call on election day would seem to the most direct and efficient way for GOYV.....

[wildandcrazyrussian]

Yours is the first comment on all the threads I have seen who has pointed out the obvious. As I understand it (and I have over 25 years computer experience), the entire purpose of the Orca project was to capture, using the 34,000 volunteer pollwatchers, the names and voter IDs of people who had actually come in to vote. Why do that? So that you can call every who hasn't come in to vote yet to remind them to get out there and vote. But with computer-generated phone calls, it takes no more human time to call 2,000,000 then 1,000,000 voters, it just costs more. So if there were a communications failure or computer problem or whatever, the worst thing that should happen is that -- lacking election day information -- you just call everyone just in case.

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.