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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.

Just call everyone that you don't have confirmation has voted...exactly - this seems like so much technological overkill - in fact you really don't need confirmation one way or the other - in our case it was the local town Republican Party which made the calls, in person as I remember it. If you hadn't voted you got a sort of personalized urging to get going, and if you had, a polite thank you. I never minded getting the reminder call even if I had already gone to the polls, and if I had minded, so what - they already had my vote.

In a way I am encouraged to hear this info about ORCA - it's one of maybe several missig links - after hearing about all the enthusiasm of Republicans going into election day, and the party identification advantage they had, it's been mystifying as to why the 'pub turnout was as low as it seems - it looks as though the 'rats had their usual GOTV A Game while the GOP had virtually none at all. As John Fund noted in talking about this fiasco on Fox tonight, one of the first things the Party should do in getting ready for 2014 is fire a bunch of the useless hangers-on consultants who've been bringing on embarrassments like this for years.......