Posted on 11/09/2012 3:43:19 PM PST by mojito
The Wednesday before the election, Mitt Romney sent a special message to volunteers about a special project his campaign was working on: “With state of the art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on election day.” What is it they say about something that sounds too good to be true? It probably is. That was the case with the Romney campaign’s “Project ORCA.”
The idea behind Project ORCA was simple, albeit far too complex in execution. Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way to track who had been to the polls in swing states, and who had not. It was the most complicated GOTV (get out the vote) effort in GOP history.
[....]
Starting in the early afternoon, reports were coming in from across swing states that ORCA had crashed. That morning, when Shoshanna [a GOTV volunteer] was on the phone with Boston, she was told the system was crashing, unable to withstand thousands of simultaneous log-ins. The system had never been stress tested and couldn’t handle the crush of traffic all at once. Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed. My source familiar with the campaign described it this way, “It was a giant [mess] because a political operative sold a broken product with no support or backup plan. Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign.”
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Yeah well I was a computer programmer in the military and when I was overseas they would send us new programs from the states that were usually having to be queeked bfore they could work in our system...
and that was 35 years ago...
does *** still happen of course as you said...
My question would have to be How could such “expert” CEO types like Willard and his cronies not TEST the stupid new soft ware to make sure it would actually WORK ???
JESUS H. CHRIST
As part of the project I am planning, I have investigated AUTOMATED STRESS TESTERS.
You don’t even need to have live humans. You can simulate 10,000 artificial users with each copy of the program running on a different server. HOW HARD IS IT TO BUY A TESTING PROGRAM??!?!?
And that is basically what happened here.
They could have had a real-world stress test AND a full-scale beta test AND a user acceptance test by just allowing their thousands of carefully-vetted volunteers to bang on the app some Saturday several weeks before the election.
Instead, someone who apparently has no real-world systems implementation experience lived in a dreamworld that you switch on access the day you need the system to work - and the only day that the system can do anything for you - and despite years of accumulated experience to the contrary, it can be expected to deliver.
Not.
Bet they outsourced the coding to India.
I doubt coding was the problem here. Something this screwed-up requires really, really bad managers.
RINO File.
Be prepared to hear all about lots of “voters staying home”...the GOTV effort was f’d up.....Orca was flawed etc...the Bipartisan Oligarchy would rather we all stew in that mess..than having us all bothered, and deciding to investigate, about all the voters voting who never voted...
Listening to descriptions of how “Democrats got out their ground game” with “superior ability to bring those to the polls who normally would never go” by the commentators on Fox election night..made me realize..what they actually have done is track names that HAVE NOT VOTED IN MANY, MANY elections cycles....and vote them.
A well-funded project, county-by-county..to examine the names signed in at at the polls..and going out to find those individuals..you’ll find they were never physically at he polls..or they themselves never filled out the absentee ballot....or their names in the death registers.
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.......
She is a Birther, so don't expect something like facts keep her from posting fantasy.
This was Romney campaign's 'high tech get out the vote' tool that was going to give Romney that landslide, as opposed to Obama’s successful effort.
Well it was one disaster after another leading to Tuesdays results.
In 2010 I warned of the risks of an inept party taking the house and how it would risk re-electing O and more recently I had no faith in Romney to take on Obama, but just look at this disaster.
And Karl Rove Crossroads that spent millions of dollars of other Republicans money promising to get rid of O all wasted.
Wishing is not doing. You cant win with a team of losers. We need a dramatic change.
I was just about to post this and saw you already did.
The party of losers/
I’m sure Rove’s bank account isn’t suffering....he’s proof that PT Barnum was right.
How about Trump? There is sucker bait.
I have no trust in Rove but at least I can occasionally watch him to see what he says and find his flaws, and he has many. His FNC gig and Crossroads are a conflict of interest;
But Dick Morris? He is a contemptible rodent who I cant even listen to, He predicted a landslide for R. Nothing good comes out of him. He gives me the creeps.
Faux News had their own version of “Hopium.”
ROTFL!
Nothing compared to Rush.
He kept saying the polls showing Romney would lose were all rigged and then said he would win in a landslide/
Then the day after all his wisdom was shown wrong he goes on about how the country is doomed because most voters wont vote R because ....(doomsday).
He also predicted Rs will win 2006 and 2008.
You got a really want to live in a fantasy world to believe him.
He wasn’t always like this.
Ohio does not require a voter ID, as in an ID with a photo.
Ohio allows a voter to, at the last moment, fill out a provisional ballot, using *a copy* of a utility bill, or *a copy* of a government check made out to the voter ... as just a couple examples of low-grade authentication.
Quite literally millions of people could vote that way on election day.
It remains the duty of each county’s board of elections plus the Ohio Sec’y of State office, to challenge/investigate every single provisional ballot-voter’s authenticity.
This provisional-ballot-voting method forces all such jurisdictions and their taxpayers to come up with a process for thoroughly completing that task of double-checking the validity of the provisional-voter’s claimed authentication.
The investigation can sometimes be completed via Internet searches and then comparing notes with voting records-and-activity, but for many cases, the board of elections investigators must go to the alleged/claimed address used for the provisional ballot.
It is a logistical problem, and usually only some portion of provisional ballots are investigated -— sets of districts/precincts of a few counties, unless some statistical analysis of the tabulated data reveals reasonable probability of fraud or technical failure.
In Ohio, you must be a registered voter to vote, and you must be a U.S. citizen.
Unfortunately, where you would have expected each Sec’y of State in the Union, to challenge the authenticity of Barack H. Obama’s birth/birthplace, they typically do not; rather, they “leave that problem to later court challenges.”
Similarly, the test of U.S. citizenship for every voter registered in Ohio -— *it is not checked* unless there arises some “reasonable ...” that triggers a bureaucratic response and investigation.
Making matters worse, the duration of residency in Ohio, is now only “30 days immediately before the election in which you vote.” You may begin to realize why inner-city politicos rebel against the destruction of abandoned structures; it is a simple matter to not spend time in Ohio but be a “30 day resident with a copy of an electric bill.”
Basically, all you need to do, is succeed at acquiring *A COPY* of an electric bill or bank statement that has your name and Ohio address on it ... *BEFORE* the 30th day that is *BEFORE* the election ... and be registered to vote by no later than that “30th day that is *BEFORE* the election.”
Note, the law does not require that any money be shown on the electric bill or bank statement - the *copy* only has to show your name and address.
Statistically, some provisional ballots with such “backing that is fraudulent,” are thrown out, but again, statistics are relied upon. That is, after finding and throwing out, for example, “2,232 provisional ballots,” *statistics tell us that the odds of finding ‘the next’ trove declines in terms of the number of votes.* So, if a vote is close, that next trove will be looked for, but if the vote is not close, then ‘the next’ trove is *not* looked for, and so on ... as statistics are relied upon instead of deliberation.
Yeah, you’re right -— for us, IT IS IMPORTANT -— but it’s just a job for the bureaucrats who do not feel much pressure from the public, to investigate both the validity of registration and the validity of provisional ballots.
The law says, Don’t do this or that, but enforcing the law, does not happen at the polls - *NOBODY* in Ohio is challenged to prove their U.S. citizenship on election day at a poll. *ONLY* Ohio residency is challenged, very weakly, and after election day, *ONLY* sporadic, subsequent investigations of some relatively few provisional ballots and voter registrations occur.
On this occasion, you can thank the Ohio Republican Party, for its “poor execution” (to borrow a term that excites “corporate American” management types who bungled communications and field operations for the Romney campaign) /sarcasm.
You try to insult me and neglect to ping me. So who is found to be dishonest? Hm?
Heh, heh. Yes, there are all kinds of automated load & stress testing tools. The tools I’ve used were built by Mercury and Rational.
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