Posted on 11/08/2012 10:30:53 PM PST by 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.
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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.
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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.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
I’d be fascinated to know the contracts and management of both this and their failed mobile VP announcement app.
I’m certain there’s a staff GOP consultant who treated it like a getting-while-the-getting’s-good enrichment strategy, just as they do the ad development and ad placement sides of the ‘business’. Romney is rich, but he’s also a senior citizen who was taken in by the scam artists who are the perennial GOP consultancy.
“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, “
GOP-e nominated the guy who (last time around) lost the primary to McCain who then lost to 0bama.
What could POSSIBLY go wrong? (We know the answer now.)
Do a little research on how ALL the Romney people were vetted. You will find that there was an overriding cronyism qualification that had nothing to do with ability or experience.
At the end of the day, it is clear the GOTV by this campaign failed miserably.. which honestly makes no sense to me, but if Obama can lose 10 Million votes, and Romney doesn’t even get as many votes as McCain... and Obama winds up winning you got a problem.
I did notice when I early voted in FL that there were campaign signs for all candidates except Romney. I remember thinking that was pretty poor planning. Cars were parked by the entrance of the parking lot with democrat candidates and signs offering rides to polling stations.
Shockingly there were no campaign signs for Romney and no workers with literature at the polling station I watched for ORCA.
Other articles and posts have said that they wanted 15,000 but got 34,000 volunteers for ORCA. that’s 19,000 extra volunteers who offered their whole day who could have done other functions to GOTV.
I guess Obama’s community organizing experience does come in handy.
Very sad fail. But why are republicans always so quick to turn on their own and sit out the vote on 1 principle when their other 99 principles are going to go down in flames at the hands of liberals?
For my own mental sanity, I’m going to tune out for a while and try to figure out how to keep my business going another 4 years.
I am serious. This morning’s email from Ryan was titled “Today we need your vote”.
The app didn’t work in the polling place for me - no service.
The credentialing was fine - we were all fully informed.
There was one tremendous drawback - it was impossible to hear the names of the voters, so even in the best of circumstances I was catching maybe 1/4 of the names.
I felt my time would have been better spent outside or at a phone bank. But I was happy for the opportunity to observe the process and see how to improve voter registration and integrity for the next election.
BTTT
Empirically the Obama campaign has show the single best way to reach voters is to go to where they are and drag them to the vote. Whether that is having them fill out the ballot and depositing it for them or dragging them to the polls in a bus, it's the same thing: go to the voter, don't rely on them coming in.
Of course if the voter is imaginary, the vote is from fantasyland, but that also doesn't seem to matter....
Do you think that the Romney people hired systems design people so incompetent that they didn’t analyze and account for the peak requirements in a system specifically intended to handle a very time-sensitive and bulky load requirement?
Realize that I am saying this as a person who has learned that when I’m working on a critical issue I EXPECT my computer to fail. I have back-up means specifically to handle that situation because I have experienced it so many times. Word goes to a crawl every time I am working on a critical post for my blog or some legal document - this last time because a file had code (and apparently looping scripts) added to it which doubled the size so that Word and Outlook Express couldn’t handle it well. Wordpress won’t upload my files. Emails disappear. My anti-virus program is disabled. The latest thing was when Word wouldn’t let me save my documents as PDF’s, which is the format I need to use to post to Wordpress. I didn’t do anything to my computer to impact it one way or another, but after a couple weeks Word suddenly decided to let me save PDF’s again. I store files externally so they won’t get lost when my computer is trashed. I have the mechanisms in place to retrieve what was left on my computer when it is trashed - which I’ve had to use twice now.
Those of us who have observed the Obama regime’s sabotage first-hand are prepared for these things. If Romney’s designers were just using the standard precautions they would get blown away, simply because they didn’t know who and what they were up against.
That’s the background I’m speaking from, and there are others here who have learned the same things as I have. Until the “cool” people learn to listen to what people like me have learned, they will always underestimate the enemy and find themselves unprepared to handle what is thrown at them. There is a reason that Alinsky wants to marginalize the “conspiracy theorists”: because if people took the watchdogs seriously they would lock their doors instead of being eaten alive by the wolves.
If anybody in the political establishment wants a fighting chance at saving this country, they need to stop blowing Alinsky libel out their rear ends so they can be “cool” like the media, and start listening instead.
You should post this [#41] as a stand alone thread.
Here are a couple of posts I made about my ORCA experience, yesterday on the NC forum:
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Project ORCA... Was anyone else here involved in that?
For anyone who didn’t hear about it, it involved being a poll watcher for the Romney campaign, but the idea was to collect the names of those who had voted throughout the day, and to relay that info up to the HQ in Boston, by way of smart phone app. From there they’d apparently bug those Rs who hadn’t yet voted.
Really interesting concept, I heard about it a month or so ago, realized I had some personal days I could take at work, and put them all in for this week. Signed up for the program (they called it a “task force”), and was accepted. Was really excited about helping out. They ended up assigning me to the precinct next to my own in Cornelius.
Sadly it was a bust. That morning I couldn’t even log on to the “app” they provided (actually it was just a website, not sure why they were calling it an app). Collecting the data on voters was next to impossible, as there was one of me, and voters checked in as many as five at a time at two long tables as I sat at an assigned chair off to the side, and as I wasn’t allowed to view the books of registered voters, I had to sign off only as many names as I could actually hear. 3% would be a generous estimate as to how many that turned out to be - most people speak too softly. On top of that I had to quickly flip through the more than sixty pages of names I had printed out the night before.
I was told by both the campaign and the poll manager that at 10, 2 and 4 I could view lists of who had voted. At the time I assumed that meant the books, but later found out (at 10, of course, when I was rebuffed) that I couldn’t go near the books, and instead had to wait for a print-out of names, after the certifications had been scanned and processed. At 10, and again by 2, they hadn’t even begun to scan them, as they were apparently backed up. So, I had nothing to work with.
By 4, they said I could sort through the stacks of certifications. I did as many as I could before being told that they needed to begin scanning, so I had to hand ‘em back. I took the names that I did have, and after spending over an hour bouncing around on the phone with several different kids in Boston, they finally reset my log-in info. Eventually it accepted my log-in and as I began to input the names... the website crashed on me, never to return.
My understanding is that most of the volunteers experienced similar problems. Interesting idea, could really be a powerful tool one day, but this year it was a bomb. Who knows... I’ve read that Romney lost OH, FL, VA and CO by a combined ~300,000 votes, and had this been working properly, maybe it could have made the difference.
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I think something like ORCA could be a powerful tool. Really, each state GOP should undertake something like this, but combine it with traditional outreach and GOTV. Don’t overly centralize it either, delegate it out by regions, to counties, to neighborhoods. Probably better to have a neighbor knocking on doors than it is to get a robo-call from across the country. And instead of waiting for a prez or congressional election to try it out, do a dry run in the odd-year elections.
It would be a violation of commie Standard Operating Procedure if they did NOT infiltrate the Romney campaign.
There were moles, saboteurs, and, probably, electronic bugging.
That’s the reality. We gotta deal with it.
GWB & the RNC had a massive and effective computerized volunteer get-out-the vote operation in 2004; having beforehand used previous volunteers to use 411-information and every other possible resource to fill in the phone numbers in a database for every registered Republican, state by state; and a telephone call center, telehoning from our own homes & ground-based volunteers, getting out the vote before and during election night
I know I worked on it
the telephoning system, in and off the call centers put back into the database if the person called had been contacted amd if they shared who they were voting for
and GWB won with the Iraq war on and with a media that had demonized him 100s of times worse than the media did to Romney
so, who was not minding the store on Romney’s team
and why don’t they quit allowing pundits to scapegoat everyone but his own team
Still, that does not excuse the campaign or the GOP for not properly overseeing GOTV operations.
One time we were told to call people on a list, and it turns out everyone we called had already voted absentee. Another time a state assemblyman in a close race walked in, and everyone was calling people outside his district.
That being said, there is no excuse for the kind of widespread GOTV failure that apparently occurred this week. The world has advanced beyond paper and pencil. The Rats have mastered the new technology, but we have not.
Are you seriously blaming Obama for your virus infested computer?
Realize that I am saying this as a person who has learned that when I’m working on a critical issue I EXPECT my computer to fail. I have back-up means specifically to handle that situation because I have experienced it so many times...
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Excellent post. I'll leave it to the experts to speculate as to whether it was campaign/GOP incompetence, Rat infiltration, or a combination of both. It must be investigated by the GOP or others so that it does not happen again.
When I'm working on something especially time crucial, I will make sure my files are backed up. If I have hours remaining on critical deadline, I will back up often. Like you, I have to expect that something will fail, as the consequences of failure could be disastrous.
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Interesting. Another posted also noted that, but they said they heard probably only 3% of the names. Presumably the Rats also face the same issue, but they must have a different way of dealing with it.
In reading accounts of this story, I don’t see anything beyond the realm of piss-poor systems management getting crossbred with the mindset of political hacks and the raw arrogance inherent in the mindset of those who think RINOs are the best candidate. Face it, if you can deny the history of elections since 1980 and think Romney was the best choice, the ability of your brain to incorporate reality into your reasoning is already shown to be severely compromised.
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