An inside look behind Romney's loss: An epic failure of its Orca big-data app

computerworld.com ^ | 11/9/12 | Preston Gralla

[Evil Slayer]

Many things went wrong with Romney's campaign for president, but one of the biggest was the epic failure of the campaign's big-data app for getting out the vote, called Orca. When the campaign needed it most, Orca was beached.

Politico has an excellent summary of the problems it says that Orca had. Among them were that the Romney campaign kept it secret and didn't beta-test it before it was rolled out on Election Day. That meant that the people who it was designed for -- the thousands of volunteers across the country -- didn't have a chance to learn how to use it before it was launched. And Orca kept crashing throughout the day.

The system was designed to identify likely Romney voters who had not yet voted on Election Day, and then get them to vote. But it continually crashed and people didn't know how to use it. Here's what Politico has to say about the consequences:

The numbers in the interface never moved, leaving officials in Boston and out in the states "flying blind" -- a phrase used by several people. The workers on the ground didn't know what doors to knock on or what efforts to make with which voter targets who had not yet turned out --- some efforts were made but they were slow and more cumbersome. And the campaign officials also generally didn't know which precincts to send auto-calls into to try to boost turnout -- especially in precincts in Ohio, where there is no party affiliation in the general election. Instead of targeted information, all they really had to work with was the generic raw vote tallies in various counties.There's an even more damning inside account by John Ekdahl at Ace of Spades, who was involved as a volunteer. He says that he

[DJ MacWoW]

Many things went wrong with Romney's campaign for president, but one of the biggest was vote fraud.

[jennychase]

Meg Whitman also tried same software and same approach and she also failed.
Main problem is GOTV. Obama campaign use census data and voted absentee for those who avoid voting and rest showed up.

GOP trust machine interaction than combination. They should increase registration and change RNC chairman.