Politico: Romney's ORCA (vote tracking program) sank his GOTV operation

[agentS]

There are few earlier threads on the ORCA system, in which one Repub aide said it was "harpooned and dead on the beach".
In this article, we find out a little more as to why.

The system was not shared with officials outside a small group in Boston and was kept largely a secret until the immediate lead-up to Election Day. The system was beta-tested on its own but not within technical infrastructure of the Boston TD Garden, where the Romney campaign’s massive War Room was set up. That accounted for a number of the problems, officials conceded, even as they protested to POLITICO the depth of the Election Day meltdown.

Three sources described the campaign to POLITICO as “flying blind” on Tuesday in terms of targeting, with ORCA — which had a pricetag of hundreds of thousands of dollars — failing. There was another sizable allocation of funds for emergency robocalls to goose turnout late in the day in key areas identified by ORCA, but those were never put to widespread use.

Uh, wouldn't it have been a smart idea to check whether the system would work in the MOST IMPORTANT LOCATION before full roll-out? I mean, you know, to make sure all hardware and software would be working? It's like putting a Saturn V rocket together in the backyard and setting it up without testing the guidance system.

“A lot of data came into the system that we have on file now,” he said, although he couldn’t answer questions about whether it was continuous throughout the day or simply at the end. He insisted that 91 percent of all counties reported into the system, 14.3 million voters were accounted for as “voted,” and 5,397 reports of voting issues were reported, such as broken machines and a dearth of ballots.

“Look, we experienced challenges through it,” Moffatt said, but he insisted, “It allowed us to continue our GOTV efforts and allowed us at such a massive scale to track voting irregularities.” Like where? “Florida, Ohio. We were seeing different things coming in through the alerts.”

I guess they wanted to make sure their election fraud tricks were working. Too bad, they weren't- even with crappy voting machines on their side.

But then, the TRUTH comes out on page 2!

One Republican source with close ties to the operation said the system essentially appeared to have crashed on the first wave of information coming in, and never managed to get started again. It was down throughout the day, and while it may have been gathering numbers, it never provided the output in terms of target guidance it was supposed to, said a source.

“The problem is not only that it doesn’t work on Election Day,” said the source. “The problem is, you divert an enormous amount of human and financial resources over many months to [building this]. So that means they’re not doing anything else for turnout.”

Several Romney backers stressed that, based on the outcome on Nov. 6, this system breakdown was not the reason they lost. But it was a striking meltdown of a project the campaign heralded as a key ingredient to success. One Republican who helped operate the system from Boston on Election Day called it a near-complete “failure” and an “amateur operation.” Throughout the morning, volunteers in the states called frantically back to headquarters to alert campaign officials to ORCA’s deficiencies: Users’ login information and data entry failed and a backup phone system locked out many campaign workers and failed to confirm that information from others had been received. Cries for help from the campaign help desk went more or less unanswered.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83653_Page2.html#ixzz2BoxZFAYx

Romney to ORCA: You're doing a heckuva job!
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83653_Page2.html#ixzz2BoxKckGF

[myrna minx]

1. This campaign is fascinating! More so that then Palin surreality. Were they sold some sort of

Com_Pu-TER tabulation machine and nerve tonic? It cures *everything*? Did a con man con the cons? I can't wait to find out every wild detail about this campaign and their delusions. *mind reels*

[ellie]

4. Me too!

I love the post mortems.

[PATRICK]

2. These type of people

are really too stupid/incompetent to really be all that effectively evil with technology. I thought they("serious" power grabbers) would have learned something from Hitler other than methodology and enthusiasm for setting smarter people loose on a problem the people on top are too feeble minded to understand.

Minus the morons and psychopaths and where is there leadership? With leadership like that who are their favored employees? With employees that scummy how well can it really work? And if it works how can it be used by the power dolts for their fantasies?

[KharmaTrain]

3. Absolutely Astounding...

...and this from a candidate who claimed to be an efficient manager. This is just another story in what will go down as one of the most poorly run campaigns ever.

It also points to how blinded they were to reality. Their skewed polls assured that there was gonna be this massive wave of Obama-hating voters that would overwhelm President Obama's early voting edge and create some massive wave to propel Willard into the Oval Office. They must have been so certain that they gave up on much GOTV effort...ORCA was dead on the beach before it even hit water.

They also underestimated the Obama machine and vote. While they saw polls showing lesser enthusiasm with some younger Obama voters in '08, they failed to recognize there were another 4 years of voters who were eager to vote and came out big for the President. Willard thought all the SuperPac money would bombard from the air (it worked during the primaries) and would drive voters away from President Obama. It had the opposite effect.

While we should congratulate Team Obama for running a brilliant campaign, they had a lot of help from an inept and horrid opponent.