It flopped...
Last I heard, it walked the Jersey beaches with Obama.
If memory serves, Project ORCA relied on the Republican voter database called Voter Vault.
We notified GOP and other officials that Voter Vault was compromised as far back as 2004 to no avail. The Dems have access to it and they manipulated it in the state of Virginia quite a bit. Of course, the GOP denied that there was a problem even in the face of Dems admitting to it in Loudoun County.
The party has been infiltrated for a long time. A lot of good ideas have been destroyed by these infiltrators. The party is done until they man up and fix the issues instead of denying them.
Good luck. I’m done beating my head against a brick wall.
Harpooned?
Like everything else from the Romney campaign, it was just smoke and mirrors.
I read that the Warren(D) campaign used it in Massachusetts, and some other D campaign in Indiana(? maybe)
I have no faith in any of our voter roll info. In OR the GOP was putting together a new system called Merlin. We were supposed to be able to pull out data from SOS on who had voted. I was calling the non-voters & found tons of disconnected numbers. And virtually all of the people I talked to said they’d already voted. One elderly couple said they’d sent their ballot in as soon as they received it (two weeks ago!).
Ask Reince Priebus. I’m sure he has an answer to your question.
If he doesn’t answer, try again ... and again ... and again ...
This is exactly the same story I heard from someone who signed up in Florida who participated in on-line training and conference calls, never got credentials, and just received busy signals trying to get on election eve call. Could it have been sabotaged internally or was it always just a scam?
Monday night I tried the call in number - could not get through. Within 5 minutes Project Orca called me for the last 2 minutes of a disjointed message and then got disconnected. No paper work or assignment or download to smart phone ever arrived.
I was on the Obama email list and marveled at the efficiency with which it was run.
The Obama campaign team kept in touch regularly with list members. Each member was assigned a serial number, and the campaign would keep track of how much money he donated. In future campaigns, the GOP needs to match this level of efficiency.
It doesn’t work unless you run the voting machines. Then it works every time.
Interesting snafu. So much for Romney running a “brilliant” campaign.
The Rebuplicans seem to have a hard time to turing grassroots enthuiasm.
For example instead of using the Tea Party to their advantage the GOP spent a lot of energy to distace themselves from these ‘dangerous radicals’.
Volunteered to be a poll watcher here in NC. Locally, it was a mess when the Romney people were assigning people to poll watch without notifying the county Republican offices (who, by state law, are the only ones who can certify poll watchers). Thought that was straightened out by the weekend; then a “glitch” from Boston kept most of the volunteers in our county from getting the ORCA lists.
Never did get a list, never got the app - the whole operation was bungled from Boston.
On the plus side, I am told the app was very pretty.
My experience is the state/district/county, take your pick, are the biggest impediment to success. Once in power, they want to stay there. Those who profess to want smaller government, seem to build their own big government within their fiefdom. IMHO
>:-(
ORCA was telling the Romney headquarters that they were winning, even during Election Day. That is why they wouldn’t concede Ohio right away. Because ORCA showed Romney in a stronger position in OH than he really was.
Team Romney believed beyond doubt that they were going to win. The result caught them off-guard.
Yes - same here with some volunteers I know.
I couldn’t see the utility of Orca for GOTV efforts. First of all, it was nearly impossible to hear the voters’ names with all the noise in the polling center.
Secondly, there was no service in the semi-rural polling building I was in. So the data was slow to get to the Orca people.
One utility it had was that I was able to write voters’ names on paper and closely observe the whole process. I think that was extremely important. My friend who is pregnant waited for 2 hours in line with a 4-year-old in Northern VA, and they told her she’d already voted. :-/ Something hinky for sure.
What to do:
Spend the next two years cleaning up the voter rolls. Make sure VA voters have their registration cards ready to go on election day.
Also, when polls close, there needs to be a document where the poll workers SIGN and CERTIFY that they have a certain NUMBER of votes on their electronic system. It’s all on their computer. Poll watchers told me that when the official numbers came out, in some precincts they were LOWER than what they’d been ‘told’ for a FINAL count. So ‘telling’ isn’t good enough - make them sign something. Get it put on the law books that this is legally required - that the parties be informed in writing, if requested, of the official final count at 7:00 sharp in each precinct.
I worked outside a polling place in Alexandria handing out sample ballots. A few Republicans showed up to volunteer without training, but only one guy outside had a poll watcher memo. It seemed to me that he called in a number only after polls closed. He said that there was another Repub inside who I did not see from 9 AM thru 7 PM.
The Dems had all kinds of workers heading in and out flashing papers. A lawyer (with a foreign accent which she claimed was from England, but seemed to have a bit of French accent as well) was on station outside to help Democrat voters get provisional ballots, or a regular ballot instead of a provisional, or call assistance to guide them to other polling places. This outside lawyer was handed cases from a couple of folks working inside, a well dressed African-American women and a hard looking guy with a Slavic accent.
Another group that had folks come and hang around for a half hour to and hour several times during the day was “Election Protection” who wore black T-Shirts with that name on it, and claimed to be a non-partisan group preventing voting problems (apparently they are a Democrat operation of some sort). The ones that I talked to were young lawyers from DC.
Around noon a guy in a suit with Illinois license plates drove up and whisked inside for about ten to fifteen minutes.
At one point in the late morning, I overheard the guy in charge of the Dems handing out sample ballots (who I initially mistook for a homeless man who had wandered into the area do to his unkempt appearance and threadbare clothing) tell another Dem that he was going inside to see if there were any ballots laying around (He had a poll watcher letter). Toward the end I heard him instruct another to make sure that “our friend” got inside before the doors close, and then clean up the signs. He also mentioned that part of his job was to periodically call in “numbers”.
In any case, the Dems seemed to have a great ongoing awareness of what was going on throughout the day, and had several overlapping operations going on. Many of the ones that I talked to had been working the polls on election day for many years, and knew their way around the whole operation very well (all the Repubs outside were first timers).
One method of fraud that I had not considered before, but I now consider something to guard against, is for poll watchers or other “fair election” groups to just to wait for an opportunity to “shoplift” a handful of ballots, go somewhere to fill them out, and then reverse “shoplift” them back in to an accomplice or straight into the bin with counted ballots.
They obviously had a lot of organized folks milling in and out of the polling station all day, and Republicans did not.
I also participated. I did my job by reporting their numbers of those who voted but I have no idea what they did with the info.