Turns out that disgust at the months of ads, mailers and knocks on the door had moved many previously high propensity voters into the low propensity voter category. BO's folks understood the situation, heck, they created it. So they cajoled their turned off (formerly) high propensity voters to vote during early voting. Romney left his (formerly) high propensity voters to show up on their own on Tuesday, and far too few of them did.
RINO File.
I'm in Pennsylvania...I volunteered...shared information with a leader, had conference calls, the last day I was still waiting for my training packet and certification, when I contacted the leader, he email me a pamphlet to download, still no certification, so I finally wrote him and told him I would not be volunteering at the assigned post, due to lack of cooperation, so on election day, I go to the poll, I know almost everyone there...I asked if they had any type of legal noticatification I was a poll watcher or monitor, they said they had nothing for me but a gentleman was to be there and he never showed up, a name I did not recognize at all..to make a long story short...that program could have been sabotaged by the Liberals??? do ya think???
I've saved all my correspondence and name of the team leader..
really disappointed, but by the end of the night I mentioned to hubby, it will be a cold day when I get involved with the GOP again...I'm ready for a third party...
I had a similar situation in that I participated in conference calls and training yet no app or credentials ever arrived. I showed up at my assigned precinct at Tysons Corner anyway and the 2 ORCA people there had an extra iPad w/the app up and running that I used. We each sat behind the 3 check-in laptops and logged the voters in the ORCA app as voters arrived. We worked basically non-stop between 6am and 7pm.
I hope they work out the bugs —I can see how it is extremely helpful.
ORCA should be a case study for groupthink, confirmation bias, and intelligence failure.
Unfortunately, I’d be part of it. I really believed in the data. :(
Newt has written that he will be further analyzing the election — surely he knows about this by now?
Yep, and I can confirm the story.
The system was a total flop and wasted much manpower that could have been used to get out the vote using more traditional methods.
I could not get the app running until 2 pm and then only intermittently. In both emails and in an online Q&A session I asked them if they were going to let users do a trial run and check the system and the data base out and there was no reply. You don’t assume tha a massive nationwide computer application and software is just going to work without any testing or useage.
The entire instruction set was a .pdf of three cell phone app screens. The app was not available until early in the morning on election day, so that was your first look at it. It would have been a failure even if the communications link worked because no one saw it until election day. I consider myself IT-savvy and I couldn’t get it to work - why did they think poll watchers, who are frequently tech-illiterate retirees, would get it running?
The problem is that the people who run these campaigns are political junkies with little experience in life other than playing politics. That’s all of them, from the campaign directors to those young twenty-somethings with their political science degrees who think that they will parlay their campaign work into an influential job in the winning candidate’s administration.
The sad part is that half of them do win and end up running the US government and we are stuck with it and them. Think Stephanie Cutter and David Axelrod and all those Deputy Assistant Secretaries at DHS and EPA who have never had a real job in their lives.