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Project Orca: How an IT Disaster Destroyed Republicans' Get-Out-The-Vote Effort
cheesecake23 writes "Many talking heads have attributed Obama's success to an unmatched 'ground game.' Now, inside reports from campaign volunteers suggest that Project Orca, a Republican, tech-based voter monitoring effort with 37,000 volunteers in swing states, turned out to be an epic failure due to dismal IT. Problems ranged from state-wide incorrect PINs, to misleading and delayed information packets delivered to volunteers, to a server outage and missing redirection of secure URLs."
It's like the argument put forward by Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon - the Allies won WWII because they had the best technology, and the reason they had the best technology was because they were't the biggest assholes.
http://markpasc.org/blog/gems/athena.html
Yeah, I got so sick of the Romney calls that I put an IVR on my home phone line that prompted to press 1 to talk to a human, and hung up if they didn't dial anything, without ringing my phones or letting them leave voicemail. According to my logs that blocked 8 calls (the callerID on each was either unknown, or did point at a known Republican call center) during the 24 hours leading up to the election.
Can we get rid of the brainless AC posts already? They're all shoot-from-the-lip ignoramuses like this asshole.
I'm an Obamatron, but I can't abide the Huffpost. So I learned about this fiasco from Newser, which linked a conservative web site which linked John Ekdahl's blog. John's a Romney volunteer, and his scathing description of Orca is informed by his day job as a web developer. And the there's Pudge, who helped design Slashdot, and who I presume voted for Romney, unless he considers him too liberal.
So obviously there's no absence of IT talent on the right side of the aisle. What is missing is administrative judgment by Romney himself, who obviously bought some IT snakeoil from somebody, and has generally managed to find total clowns to run his campaign.
People keep telling me about this brilliant guy named Mitt Romney who had a brilliant academic career (MBA and JD from Harvard), did well as a management consultant and equity capitalist, and accomplished great things as Governor of MA, even though the other party controlled the legislature. But I just don't see how that can be the same guy!
Do they even have "the Internets" in trailer parks, yet? I would think it wouldnn't ve economical to lay down the tubes there.
You might be surprised to learn that your average trailer park superintendent may have more experience running a WiFi mesh network than you do.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Bullshit. The Republican base are still as dedicated to vengeance and pursuit of theocracy as ever, and still control the House so they can and will still stonewall progress.
The polarization of US is no accident. One cannot sit idly by waiting for ENEMIES to have a group hug. The US is too large to be one country, and as nature takes its course regionalism and the desire for self-determination rear their heads again. (The US has helped break up far smaller countries under UN auspices, but enforces Federal unity at gunpoint.)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Interesting.
However, the NYTimes exit polling gives a more nuanced version of this. For those with college degrees, a majority voted for Romney. For those with Post Grad degrees, Obama was the overwhelming choice.
Source (scroll down to "Education"