Project Orca Catharsis
I'm wondering about other folks' experiences working with Project Orca, Romney's state-of-the-art, cellphone-based GOTV program. Mine was a failure and an embarrassment. And I sensed it the night before the election, when I called the 800 number for our final conference call and got a busy signal.
The next morning, I loaded the program on my Blackberry only to find that the names of registered voters and the "voted/not voted" tabs didn't line up. Then, after setting up at my precinct, I found out that cellphones with cameras are not allowed in Virginia precincts (So whose idea was it to base your GOTV program on a platform that is banned in at least one swing state?). Now, my precinct is one of two which votes in the same building, one upstairs and one down. When I opened up my paper copy of the voter list, not only did it include the names for both voter rolls, but they also duplicated each name. Instead of 20 pages, I had to flip through 77.
By 8:30am, I was burnt out, trying to catch names from the two election officers' computer screens. Knowing that my precinct is run by good, by-the-book folks and that no detectable fraud would occur, I chose to comfort myself with a second, hot breakfast. I left feeling deeply embarrassed in front of my neighbors, who run the precinct every year, and who(A) saw what a failure Project Orca was and (B) now have the sneaking suspicion that I don't trust them to run a fair election.
So, when I got to my breakfast spot, I tried to enter the names of those who had voted -- roughly 25% of the precinct list by 8:30am -- and the program crashed my Blackberry halfway through. Once I rebooted the program, I found that the names I had registered had been lost, and that I'd have to start anew. So I looked at the back-up options. Each one had me calling 1-800-MITT4VA. Since it was getting later now, and Blackberries don't have letters on their keypads, I just gave up. (Why did the emergency number have to spell something out? That only slows down response time, or, in my case, makes it too complex to worry about. It isn't like the campaign needed to sell Romney to their volunteers.)
A friend in North Carolina told me that Project Orca didn't contact him until the night before the election and told him to work a precinct four hours from his home. He would've had to leave at 1 am to get to the polls in time.
Now, if anyone else had a horrible experience with Project Orca, or a good one, please post your story here. If any of the campaign folks who came up with this scheme or helped organize the effort would like to defend it, please do so as well.I'd love to hear how it worked out for y'all. I already know how it worked out for Mitt Romney.
- If you wish to join the conversation on this post, we invite you to become a Ricochet Member. Enjoy great content and podcasts, get a year's subscription to National Review Digital, post your own opinions, converse with leading figures on the Right, and much more -- all for the cost of only one cup of coffee per month. Ricochet - The Right People. The Right Tone. The Right Place.
- Comment (38)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (5)
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
Comments:
Aug '12
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
I was an ORCA poll watcher in Pennsylvania. Neither the smartphone app, nor the phone-based backup worked all day. It was extremely frustrating, and by 1pm, my ORCA colleague and I (yes - there were TWO of us!) completely gave up trying to call in the results.
Fortunately, we also had a County GOP poll watcher who maintained his own list and took the hard-copy to the phone banks at 3pm.
My county went for Obama, 52/48.
All day long, I couldn't help but think that the system was either hacked, or sabotaged from within by a closet Obama supporter. It wouldn't be that difficult to do. I'd be interested in seeing the post-mortem.
Oct '10
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
As opposed to the clown who actually has run the country for the past 4 years and given us no budgets, trillion dollar deficits, $16 tril debt, Benghazi, Fast 'n Furious, purely-partisan Obamacare, 15% real unemployment, 23 million on food stamps? And you're more concerned about a poor GOTV program that probably had near-zero input or control from the candidate? Wow.
Apr '12
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
Yes.
Edited on November 9, 2012 at 7:12pmMar '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
Now that I think about it, this ORCA fiasco shouldn't surprise me at all. I live near Tampa where the RNC Convention was held. I signed up to volunteer. I attended the meeting a couple weeks before the convention. But, frankly, the entire thing was a bit of a mess to the point where I said screw it and backed out of volunteering. I signed up for a position and then two weeks before they said it wasn't available. They said they'd send me info on where to pick my uniform. Never got it. The parking the day of the meeting was about as bad as I've ever seen (and I'm 42 and I used to work in L.A.).
I'm willing to give the convention leeway since a hurricane was blowing through. But all of this was well before anyone knew where Isaac would be going. The young people running the volunteer operations I met gave more the impression they were doing it to get close to people in power than doing it because they were interested in the Party as a whole. So, ORCA shouldn't have been a surprise to me.
Jun '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
My only laugh of the night? When I realized that the Mitt Romney campaign job I was up for was the ORCA leadership role.
I guess they didn't need someone who had actually delivered global enterprise app projects.
Pseudodionysius There's an old, old joke amongst techies who actually cut code about consultants in suits and unfortunately Team Romney followed the script right into the dumpster.
The best thing the Repubs can do is steal a chapter from Apple's start up days and buy some dumpy warehouse, run up a pirate flag, lock the front door and no one communicates with them except for one guy. Its a Lockheed Skunkworks for the George Gilder crowd.
Forget turnarounds: Mitt and the SuperPAC's need to fund Team Startup, Republican Reboot. Tony Stark: Pony up the cash. · 26 minutes ago
Jul '12
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
Congratulations Fat Dave. You made Headlines over at http://hotair.com/
Oct '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
Pseudodionysius
There's an old, old joke amongst techies who actually cut code about consultants in suits and unfortunately Team Romney followed the script right into the dumpster.
...
Forget turnarounds: Mitt and the SuperPAC's need to fund Team Startup, Republican Reboot. Tony Stark: Pony up the cash. · 2 hours ago
No kidding - I've been the consultant in a suit, the techie who cuts code, and the customer, and the suit role was always uncomfortable owing to the weight of the smoke-and-mirrors we had to wield. I was thinking this morning that the ORCA catastrophe was likely something like that.
Love the Team Startup Skunkworks idea.
Oct '12
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
In my day job, I'm a software developer. Now I really want to know why this software project was such a colossal failure.
Apr '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
I'm sad but not surprised at all the negative experiences everyone had. I volunteered for Orca, and said I could only help from 7am to 2pm. I got emails with the training links and instructions for picking up my certifications.
The week before the election I got a call from someone in Tampa, confirming my assignment from 7am to 7pm. I said I could only do 7-2, and he said he would get back with me. He never did. On Friday before the election, I got a call from someone local, saying that there had been a mixup in Boston and I didn't get my credentials, so I couldn't be a poll watcher. She said that I could be a parking lot watcher instead. I offered to help at headquarters, but she said parking lot watcher would be the best way for me to help. I didn't really want to sit in a parking lot all day, so I declined.
On election morning, I got a call from Boston at 6:30, confirming that I was all ready to go. Disorganized from start to finish.
Jan '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
We had several Observers at my polling place (I worked the election for my village just north of Milwaukee). I couldn't tell if they were GOP or DEM - I suspect they were DEM.
We have many avenues on the Right: Ricochet, Powerline, Tea Parties, AFP, NRA...
Why not have a more coordinated process where we register online through any one of these places we visit, that 'registration' goes to the local GOP and as we vote, we update that ourselves through a phone app, back home online or through touchtone phone (for the older folks). I rec'd voicemails & e-mails from several different organizations, even after I voted early. Those resources could have been more effectively targeted to those fence sitters or lollygaggers.
This ORCA system was an interesting story, but I don't think it was the reason for the loss. Did GOP voters really need an 'app' to tell them to vote, this year? Romney is a very good man, was an OK candidate that got much better at the end but he & his campaign did not make the sale - to both the 2 million absent GOP voters and to general population>
Feb '12
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
My experience here in a precinct in Reno, NV was that the software sent by email simply did not work. I could never download any software for my cellphone. I constantly received the message, even into election day, that my browser was not compatible with the browser site provided in the email. NO ONE in the local Republican office know ANYTHING about project ORCA. The Las Vegas help line NEVER ANSWERED THE PHONE, EVER. I finally used the backup plan on the printout I made, that was to call into the 800 number and one by one type in the voter ID number. I never heard whether or not any of the work benefitted the callers. I do know that early voting reduced our election day numbers in the precinct drastically. I also know that the Democrats turned out every person they could, and that I could not be sure if our Project ORCA even turned out one additional voter for Mitt Romney. There were a lot of TOTALLY UNINFORMED voters on the Democratic side, which turned out to be good, because when Obama would win, he had NO COAT-TAILS down the ballot.
Obviously the plan had GLITCHES!!!
Sep '10
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
I think we need a visual aid for Project Orca
Aug '10
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
Pseudodionysius
There's an old, old joke amongst techies who actually cut code about consultants in suits and unfortunately Team Romney followed the script right into the dumpster.
No kidding. When I read the accounts at Ace of Spades of daily conference calls that were little more than pep talks and marketing, I got cold chills from the deja vu of doomed projects in my past.
Conservatives sometimes forget that bureaucracies aren't just an artifact of governments; they can form in the middle of a large business or organization as well. My last gig was at an extremely large bank where the IT department had devolved into a bloated bureaucracy, with a tiny sliver of coding expertise buried beneath it. Lack of testing, failure to setup user accounts, secretive centralized development, releasing software a few hours before the "go live" date... I swear, it's like a template for bad project management that gets applied to businesses the world over once "project proposals" get involved.
(An exceptionally bitter side of me wants to know how many IBM consultants the Romney campaign hired. And how many times the terms "CMS" and "CRM" were thrown around.)
Sep '10
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
I love the smell of vaporware in the morning; it smells like, misery.
Edited on November 10, 2012 at 1:12amMar '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
I listened to one of the conference calls, but Q&A time quickly devolved into cranky retirees "schooling" the trumped-up CR doing the pep talk. After awhile, the humor wore off, and we never really learned anything substantive about our roles or the software.
Apr '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
If you want to view Orca as a symptom, that's fine. I tend to think that all campaigns get some things right and some things wrong, and that it would have been a mistake to have put a lot more money in Orca.
If you want to view Orca as a cause, then you're very confused. Orca was not designed to increase votes. Orca was designed to move votes from states where we didn't need them to states where we did, mostly by directing callers to where the fight was closest.
Today, we have near perfect knowledge of the battleground vote count. Does anyone want to point me to a state we should have stopped calling and the state we should have redirected calls to? If Boston had had a 100% vote count before the day, can anyone tell me what difference it would have made?
Orca would have been handy if we were winning Ohio, Florida, and Virginia, but weren't sure which our additional state should be; New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, Wisconsin or Nevada. That did not turn out to be our problem.
Apr '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
Because we didn't have enough small donors, the R/R campaign funneled most of its money (all that above the donation cap) to the party, and the party organized GOTV. The RPV was the Romney campaign in Virgina, for GOTV purposes. You'll have seen some adverts that were from the Romney campaign; that was their job.
Mar '11
Re: Project Orca Catharsis
We can argue about the multifarious shortcomings of the Romney campaign on other threads. This one is for complaints about Project Orca. Sure, you can expect a campaign to mess some things up, but you don't build political machines by making your volunteers feel bewildered, embarrassed, and resentful, either.