Exclusive - Inside Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed Its Own Vote

Breitbart.com ^ | 11/8/12 | Joel B. Pollak

[stillonaroll]

As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely.

...

Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked.

...

Before the election, there was much fear-mongering on the Democratic side about the Republicans’ supposed plans to suppress turnout among Obama voters. After the election, GOP strategist Karl Rove accused the Obama campaign of “suppressing the vote” by running a negative campaign against Romney that kept voters at home.

The truth is much worse. There was, in fact, massive suppression of the Republican vote--by the Romney campaign, through the diversion of nearly 40,000 volunteers to a failing computer program.

There was no Plan B; there was only confusion, and silence.

[Brandonmark]

Here is another article on this subject:

Mitt Romney's 'Project ORCA' Was A Total Disaster, And It May Have Cost Him The Election

What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:

Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.

Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP's effort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.

The entire purpose of this project was to digitize the decades-old practice of strike lists. The old way was to sit with your paper and mark off people that have voted and every hour or so, someone from the campaign would come get your list and take it back to local headquarters. Then, they'd begin contacting people that hadn't voted yet and encourage them to head to the polls. It's worked for years.

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

On one of the last conference calls (I believe it was on Saturday night), they told us that our packets would be arriving shortly. Now, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion about what they meant by "packet". Some people on Twitter were wondering if that meant a packet in the mail or a pdf or what. Finally, my packet arrived at 4PM on Monday afternoon as an emailed 60 page pdf. Nothing came in the mail. Because I was out most of the day, I only got around to seeing it at around 10PM Monday night. So, I sat down and cursed as I would have to print out 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. Naturally, for reasons I can't begin to comprehend, my printer would not print in black and white with an empty magenta cartridge (No HP, I will never buy another one of your products ever again). So, at this point I became panicked. I was expected to be at the polls at 6:45AM and nothing was open. I was thankfully able to find a Kinko's open until 11PM that was able to print it out and bind it for me, but this is not something I should have had to do. They expected 75-80 year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day? From what I hear, other people had similar experiences. In fact, many volunteers never received their packets at all.

At 6:30AM on Tuesday, I went to the polls. I was immediately turned away because I didn't have my poll watcher certificate. Many, many people had this problem. The impression I got was this was taken care of because they had "registered me". Others were as well. But apparently, I was supposed to go on my own to a Victory Center to pick it up, but that was never communicated properly. Outside of the technical problems, this was the single biggest failure of the operation. They simply didn't inform people that this was a requirement. In fact, check out my "checklist" from my ORCA packet:

Notice anything missing? My guess is the second "Chair (if allowed)" was supposed to be "poll watcher certificate" but they put chair twice. This was an instruction packet that went out to 30,000+ people. Did no one proof-read it?

So, I headed back home to see if I could get my certificate. I called their official help line. It went unanswered. I tried their legal line. Same thing. I emailed them. No response. I continued to do this for six straight hours and never got a response. I even tried to call three local victory centers. All went straight to voicemail.

While I was home, I took to Twitter and the web to try to find some answers. From what I saw, these problems were widespread. People had been kicked from poll watching for having no certificate. Others never received their pdf packets. Some were sent the wrong packets from a different area. Some received their packet, but their usernames and passwords didn't work.

Now a note about the technology itself. For starters, this was billed as an "app" when it was actually a mobile-optimized website (or "web app"). For days I saw people on Twitter saying they couldn't find the app on the Android Market or iTunes and couldn't download it. Well, that's because it didn't exist. It was a website. This created a ton of confusion. Not to mention that they didn't even "turn it on" until 6AM in the morning, so people couldn't properly familiarize themselves with how it worked on their personal phone beforehand.

Next, and this part I find mind-bogglingly absurd, the web address was located at "https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca". Notice the "s" after http. This denotes it's a secure connection, something that's used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn't auto-forward the regular "http" to "https" and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down. Setting up forwarding is the simplest thing in the world and only takes seconds, but they failed to do it. This is compounded by the fact that mobile browsers default to "http" when you just start with "www" (as 95% of the world does).

By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I'm not sure if that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here's the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either.

So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

[petitfour]

The RATs do have a great get out the vote scheme. Sometimes the voters are invisible on a massive scale. I think that is awesome and should be exploited by conservatives in the future.

The United States did not come into being due to Americans playing by the rules. Americans who dreamed up this country and fought for it made their own rules and forced the British and French and Indians and Mexicans etc. to bend.

[9YearLurker]

How about corrupt people who took him for a ride?

Breitbart’s started an expose series on how the Romney consultants made decisions that made them more money but cost the campaign.

[stillonaroll]

Thanks for that comprehensive account!

GOP, are you reading this? The Orca disaster must not be repeated.

I've got complaints about the primaries: too long, too many candidates in the debates, too many Rats allowed to vote in R primaries. That's a discussion for another day. For now, Orca and the R's GOTV efforts must be studied so that they can be improved.

[Talisker]

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

[Talisker]

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

[stillonaroll]

Let's not forget that the Rats have a built in advantage in their GOTV efforts: their voters tend to live in concentrated population centers, which makes GOTV more effective by nature. R's live in rural/exurb areas, and are harder to round up on election day.

Still, the R's must get caught up technologically.

[9YearLurker]

Of course, there is also the great bitter irony of this from Mr. Harvard Business School, whose entire campaign, rather than promoting conservative principles, was “I know how to run companies, I know how to run things.”

Both PE and VC guys know how to run operationally petite investment companies, but to actually run the companies they invest in they bring in the operations executives who know how to run large organizations. The PE/VC guys aren’t really hands on at all. Yet, we repeatedly heard how hands-on Romney was, overseeing and making all kinds of campaign decisions himself.

[stillonaroll]

“It is easy to dodge a spear in the daylight, but it is difficult to avoid an arrow in the dark.” — Unknown

[9YearLurker]

Infuriating story.

But I’m from MA and yes, Romney has always been a big government, technocrat kind of guy.

[Lancey Howard]

This would explain a few things

Let me explain something else: The spam-phoning of citizens is so counterproductive that it actually suppresses voters. It is a huge turnoff and a waste of time and effort. I cannot imagine that ANYBODY appreciates the robo-calls they get during the weeks before an election. I got so tired of slamming down my home phone I finally just turned the thing off. (Thank God they don't call cell phones.)

I don't know how much money those phone bank operations cost, but their effectiveness will never be proved to me. So many people I talk to roll their eyes and say things like, "If I get one more freaking call from that (campaign/party/group) I'm staying the hell home on election day."

The single, best way to reach voters is with drive-time radio ads. Second best is TV ads. The low quality of the ads I saw and heard from Romney was pitiful. I cannot believe that alleged professional marketing people made those ads... they tried to cram so many words into each single TV ad that it all became a meaningless, irritating sales pitch to viewers who really don't feel like sitting up in their chairs to concentrate on what is being sold to them during a break in their TV show. Who wants to listen to a fast talker trying to cram everything he wants to say into a 30 second spot? It literally becomes a machine gun of , "Blah blah blah blah." Yikes, that's annoying.

The key is to highlight a single idea, one point, and make the case slowly and clearly, with wit and nuance, no matter whether it is a pro-issue ad or an attack ad. Also, a variety of ads, a mix of ads, is crucial. After awhile, people hearing the same ad for the 50th time just groan, and whatever original effectiveness the ad may have had is diminished. Nobody wants to get beat over the head by a campaign. Mix it up!

The most effective ad I saw was the Ubama ad with Colin Powell that aired in the final week of the campaign. It was perfect, and I am convinced it was worth at least a 1% swing for Ubama. I cannot now think of one Romney ad that left an impression.

Phone banks? Robo calls? How retro...
What a freaking waste...

/rant

(Future candidates - - don't freepmail me unless you can afford very high fees and are willing to give me (nearly) full control of your radio and TV ad development and production.)

[Varsity Flight]

“This explains nothing - it’s a very weak attempt to try to explain away the fact that Romney wasn’t really anyone’s choice in the primaries, he was just the guy left standing after he eviscerated via attack ads anyone who was leading him. Does anyone really need software to help them to remind people to vote for them? I submit NO, they don’t. If Conservatives want to vote for you, then you wouldn’t be able to keep them away from their polling place. Further - Ronald Reagan never had software to remind us to go vote for him.
If THIS is what they’re trying to pass off as the reason Romney lost then it really only explains what a lousy nominee he was in the first place. “

That’s right: DEFLECTION propaganda, as the talking points of THEIR candidate.

[firebrand]

That is called GOTV, not voter ID.

[stillonaroll]

Note that this is different than pre-election voter contact. GOTV (get out the vote) used to be entirely on election day, but has likely expanded a lot due to early voting laws.

GOTV's effectiveness is that you know you have specific voters who favor your candidate. With than info, and with real time updates as to which of them have not voted yet, a campaign can specifically contact those voters. The worst that happens is that they just don't vote, but some of the people you contact will turn out.

Sometimes they don't know where their polling station is; mine changed since the primary. Sometimes they think they need to bring the mailer from the county Registrar of Voters (they don't need to here in CA). Sometimes they don't know they can cast a provisional ballot.

GOTV helps to win elections, and is very cost effective in that it's largely volunteer driven.

[stillonaroll]

Yes, you are correct.

[firebrand]

What about physically sending people to battleground states? Unless they are quietly selected for their utter diplomacy and charm, I wonder about that one too.

Good suggestions. You sound like a pro.

[stillonaroll]

Let me be clear: Romney was NOT my candidate in the primaries. As everyone on FR is aware, he had imperfect conservative credentials.

My point in posting the Breitbart article is to suggest that a contributing factor in Romney's loss was the Rats' superior use of today's technology, and the R's failure in attempting to use it. This failure must be studied so that it does not happen again.

As I said upthread: I've got complaints about the primaries: too long, too many candidates in the debates, too many Rats allowed to vote in R primaries. That's a discussion for another day.

[stillonaroll]

What about physically sending people to battleground states?

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Not cost effective unless you live right next to a population center across the border in a battleground state. Here in CA, I'd have drive to Nevada--probably two tanks of gas. Better use of my resources to donate the gas money to a conservative candidate in a close race.

[Lancey Howard]

The worst that happens is that they just don't vote, but some of the people you contact will turn out.

Okay, I can see how personal phone calls from live humans can grab a few votes, as long as the callers are well-trained on how to approach people in a measured and friendly way. But the number of people who are retaining their home landlines is decreasing exponentially and therefore phone bank efforts will become increasingly less important in campaign strategery. And robo calls? Wow... They were an interesting curiosity back in the '80s, but now? Ughh.. A real irritation and, I maintain, actually counterproductive.

I also maintain that there must be better ways to utilize the energy of campaign volunteers than bothering people at home.

[stillonaroll]

The single, best way to reach voters is with drive-time radio ads. Second best is TV ads.

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Agree about radio: listeners are trapped in their cars, can't skip the commercials, only change channels. However, the radio stations know that and tend to schedule their commercials around the same time.

Disagree about TV: I almost never watch a TV commercial. Unless I'm watching a live ballgame--as I did through most of the SF Giants playoff games--I will skip through commercials via DVR.

The most effective TV ad was the one with Romney singing God Bless America off key, with shots of shuttered factories and the Caman Islands. Devastating, and Romney never effectively answered it.