It may be a stretch to blame ORCA for all of it, but it was a factor, to be sure. When you can’t GOTV on election day, you’re doing it wrong.
And we’ve got to hand it to OFA. They started this campaign the week after he was inaugurated and as much as we may hate to admit it, David Axlerod truly is a magnificent bastard.
I was an Orca volunteer and I don’t think it lost the election. I was working in NC, and my precinct was well run and we only had 1 dem in the whole place. The app didn’t work but I think that having 30K people acting as poll monitors was a positive thing.
There were two of us in the precinct doing Orca but we were also asking questions, checking the vote counts on the machines to make sure they were set to zero at opening. In the afternoon, the count of voters was off by 1 and it triggered a short investigation to find out what happened. If we weren’t there watching maybe they would have let that slide, it was only one vote. But I think they were putting in some extra effort and in 5 minutes the found the missing sticker and the tally was right on. Obviously we didn’t have enough watchers in PA and OH where I have seen many very serious stories of mass fraud.
Here’s what I think happened - Some republicans did not vote because they don’t like RINOS and some people don’t like Mormons. There was also serious fraud that I think played a larger role.
Two days ago I thought it was just a low conservative turnout but every day I’m seeing more stories of 99.5% votes in many precincts going for zero. every election has fraud, but when you have 44 precincts in PA with 99% of the vote going for a zero, then somebody needs to INVESTIGATE!
I agree (well I only agree with one of your adjectives for Axelrod, but that’s a quibble).
I hate to use this word, but it is to me incredibly STUPID to leave a nationwide GOTV effort to the presidential candidate’s campaign. Even if he is Mitt Romney.
GOTV and “Truing” the vote is something THE PARTY should be doing ALL THE TIME.
How can you expect the temporary organization of a pres. campaign (a challenger, as you say the incumbent has 4 years to work on it) to handle this monumental task?
What about all the other republicans who were running? Were they also supposed to rely on this system?
Did this massive screw-up (I see that even in the denial they admit it crashed for 90 minutes on Tuesday morning, even if that was the only problem that would be pretty bad) cost us senate seats too?
I blame the MSM a lot for this loss, but I think if we are ever going to stand a chance we are going to have to do a lot more gressroots work with the party itself.
I know people say 3rd party, but I just don’t have any faith that will be successful. Look at the infighting now. We’d probably end up not with just a third party, but a 12th party, meanwhile all the lefties will win election as Ds.