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

[applegrove]

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

by John Ekdahl at Business Insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/romney-project-orca-disaster-2012-11

"SNIP...........................................

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.

............................................SNIP"

[LisaL]

1. Romney cost himself the election. Too much flip-flopping.

[smorkingapple]

2. That was one clusterfuck of an operation on many levels. Check that dudes Twitter

You'll see it from all over the country.

So the fucking "CEO" couldn't even manage his campaign correctly? Oh shit..

[LiberalElite]

3. This is just one of 1,001 reasons Rombot lost n/t

[wilt the stilt]

4. what a clusterfuck

this is hilarious and I thought they were the "business" people. Let me tell you many businesses are so fucking incompetent. This is pretty typical of business.

[madaboutharry]

5. Romney ran a clusterfuck of a campaign.

He deserved to lose.

On edit: I think it is funny that three people here simultaneously were thinking "clusterfuck."

[speedoo]

6. I loved this final paragraph of the article:

"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."

Romney is an idiot, and so are all his Romnoids.

[Thomas B]

7. Aside from the first debate, he did everthing else wrong.

[mshasta]

8. very good point!!

thank you , I went to the link and read the entire article..very, very interesting, it looks like republicans spend millions in a system that can be working very nicely statistically speaking....however...not all working property when you need it the most!! what dumb fucks...and they got 30k something volunteers running around in circles !!crazy:

can you imagine if idiot would apply same system on a bigger level like...lets said mmmm ...a Nation like USA??!!! fucker!!

...still GOTV really did the job.

[d_r]

9. hang on

are poll watchers allowed to use their phones to upload data about who has voted to a central party tabulator?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

10. I posted some content from a website of GOP GOTV workers discussing this:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251238105