Slashdot Mirror
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."
I guess this is what happens when your backward, anti-freedom police state party systematically alienates all the programmers and sysadmins and hackers, all the good techs and IT personnel who otherwise might have wanted to help you.
Good riddance.
Looks like all his competent IT people self-deported to the other campaign?
Perhaps more people just wanted to vote for Obama.
I'd hate to think it all comes down to how good your IT team is (even though I'm on one).
Then again, perhaps it is some comfort to the Republican's -- "All we have to do is better IT next time" -- and not bother to change the message.
Letter To Iran
I thought these Republican idiots were supposed to be great businessmen and job creators. So how is it the Kenyan socialist communist fascist Marxist Muslim empty chair community organizer ran a campaign that outfoxed and outplayed them at every turn, even without having an entire media empire (Rupert Murdoch) spewing favorable propaganda 24/7 for free?
You'd almost think these Republican business geniuses were really a bunch of incompetent, thieving rich idiots who couldn't run a successful taco stand without help from their daddy's buddies and generous taxpayer subsidies coming from people who, you know, actually work for a living.
The Obama campaign probably had that many people in Ohio just getting the coffee.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
After all in the case of legitimate server outage the internet has a way to repair itself
In fact the escalation of calls from celebrity callers including gov Ridge urging me to vote Romney continued until minutes before the polls closed at 8pm and I had voted for Gary Johnson hours earlier.
Romney's loss was a Romney failure, not an IT failure.
I forgot to add this great tweet by the author of the final story linked in TFS when I submitted this to Slashdot:
Long story short: Don't beta-test an election.
The author of the linked story at Business Insider sounds quasi-tech and was a volunteer for the phone calls. He received an email late Monday night with a 60 page PDF of instructions and lists of names to call, and complained that he had to print it at home. Who prints PDF's when they can just view the document on their PC and make the calls, especially on a home inkjet printer?
It sounds like not only was the development of this tool a disaster but so was implementation at the user end point. If this tech-savvy guy tried to print at home with limited success just imagine what the "regular" Romney supporters were doing (or not doing) when they got the 60 page PDF.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I worked on Romney's IT team.
Out of the blue one day, we were told to build a 30-foot stage in the server room. Gathered the guys, and we built that 30-foot stage, not knowing what it was for. Just days later, all three shifts were told to assemble in the IT server room.
A group of people walked out on that stage, and told us that the plant is now closed, and all of you are fired. I looked both ways, I looked at the crowd, and we all just lost our jobs. We donâ(TM)t have an income.
Mitt Romney made over a hundred million dollars by shutting down our IT infrastructure, and devastated our lives.
Turns out that when we built that stage, it was like building my own coffin. And it just made me sick.
SO GLAD THIS ELECTION'S OVER
Four times in four days, I had Democratic canvassers knock at my door and pester me about whether I voted yet. I told them yes, I voted absentee, so my choices have already been made, thanks for stopping by, have a great day, good luck, etc.
Two of the four tried to unload pamphlet after pamphlet on me after I clearly said "Already voted, thanks for asking, our ballots are cast." By the fourth day, I was quite irked.
How about we ditch the annoying door-to-door crap and stick to good old fashioned email spam? You can buy a precompiled list of my political viewpoints, financial status, and email addresses from ${SOCIAL_NETWORK} for pennies on the dollar. That way I can just filter and delete what I don't want to read instead of having to stand at my door trying to talk over some rambling campaign volunteer and push their papers right back at them.
Conservatives and Oldsters bad with technology? Who would have ever expected that?
Republicans are quick to offer a plethora of options in response to any problem as long as none of them address the problem. They'll run with the flavor of the week as the absolute truth until too many people learn why it's bs and they change the narrative before too many people get wise and a herd immunity develops.
They'll have a potential answer and say it's the absolute eternal truth and it will turn out to be total crap and 4-8 weeks later there will be a completely different absolute and eternal truth to answer the same problem (for a while). See tort reform. See all of their nominees taking the leader position and being fully supported (for a while) in the dumbest game of 'hot potato'. The only way they can ever stick with an answer is when they can't think of one to replace it.
After we find out this is bs, you'll see 20 more excuses for why Mitt Romney didn't win and none of them will be simply because more Americans didn't want him.
BTW, update your spam filters with "Romney" until at least the next campaign season.
The margins are alot higher than the Republicans want to admit...this was a first class ass whooping.
This must be the voter suppression Karl Rove was talking about...
I'm always amazed at how *intolerant* leftists can be. I live in a rural "redneck" community and we have very little crime, pollution, racism and unemployment here. Our schools are ranked some of the highest in the nation and just about everyone I know graduated college. Maybe we're not as dumb as the stereotype you submit to says we are.
Hmmm. That gives me an idea. Perhaps the next "Watergate" will involve cyber warfare.
Proverbs 21:19
Maybe the people chosen to implement the IT for Project Orca really didn't want Romney to be president? It takes a village.
Used to live in a trailer park. Had Road Runner.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
I've had painful experience of this on more than one job. Something to consider the next time someone runs with the pitch "I have a lot of money, so I know how to run the country". Some people are rich through connections, looting, or luck.
The conservative Republicans - they've done it. Dozens of knee-slapping gaffes. Ideas that *laugh* in the face of tedious concepts like reality. Well done, fellows. Well done.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
On the one hand, we have this story claiming that a failed get-out-the-vote effort was a significant factor in Romney's defeat. On the other, we have yesterday's story about how Nate Silver's statistical analysis of pre-election polls accurately predicted the outcome in all fifty states. If the first is true, then Silver's predictions were only accidentally correct, beating astronomical odds; or else Nate has somehow factored Republican IT failures into his statistical models. Neither seems plausible, so I don't believe the Orca troubles were actually very important.
The 60-page printout was not a list of "people to call"; it was a voter list to be used for check-offs at a polling place (not a home) if the app didn't work. The campaign is supposed to use the check-off information to generate call lists that get issued to local campaign offices, but the poll worker doesn't deal with any of that.
Turn on Honey Boo Boo.
BLAM! You lost that argument.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Ah so this is the latest fairy dust justification they've found as to why Republicans lost. Blame it on IT.
Just more fucking nonsense.
Modern conservatives really, REALLY can't handle having their entire worldview be shattered by reality, especially the reality that Obama was not an Evil Commie Kenyan and was not ruining "their" country like they pretended. Cognitive dissonance fueled by self delusion, but the tank is on empty now. Liars and charlatans are trying to cover their deception by blaming anything and everything to see what sticks, what allows the 'smart' guys in the party stick around with minimal guilt of hypocrisy.
Cheers.
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)
1. Many, many eligible voters didn't vote at all. For anyone.
2. Romney still got only a few percentage points less than Obama in the popular vote.
3. Many, many voters are as dumb as mud no matter who they voted for.
3. Ron Paul would have had the enthusiastic support of many of the type of young tech savvy folks that Obama has working for him but the “real” Republicans, and Democrats for that matter, are terrified of him. The Republican power mongers are just that, more interested in power than their supposed ideology.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
First self recriminations have all had to do with "we didn't spin things the right way"; the second round was "if we had just gotten the pro-rape candidates to shut their mouths", and now it's the failure of technology. Anything but the actual substantive policies they've been writing, legislating, and endorsing. Early on they had this plan to only talk about the economy, but in reality, in their governance there was @#$@ all to do about the economy so they tried to legislate sex, women's reproductive systems and choices, etc. Because those are the things that actually turn them on. The republicans are torn between their beliefs and the the things the country will tolerate in governance.
Obama has been no prince. Weak leadership; neoliberal reflexes, complete kiss-up to the military industrial system (drone killings in yemen go largely unreported just hours after his victory), nevertheless, the republicans provided a policy vision that was completely repugnant outside of the rural white south and white ranch west, and places sympathetic to them.
The fact is, technological glitches or not, pretty much everyone who wanted to got to the polls and voted; there was little more GOTV either side could do, and given that the only thing that makes a difference is policy, policy, policy, not servers. Republicans you need to rethink your principles not your spin and not your software.
...is Robo-calling. In the 3 week before election I was getting more than a dozen republican robo-calls per day (I'm in Virginia, a so-called battle ground state with a tight race). Nothing says "You aren't worth my time, peasant" like a robo-call. By contrast I didn't get a single robo-call from democrats.
that is basically willing to blame anything and anyone for their failure to secure a presidential victory. it is to politics as a petulant spoiled child is to a classroom.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you don't see it, then either you're blind, or you choose to get your information from unreliable sources. FACT: The deficit and unemployment rate have gone down steadily since Obama took office, except for minor bumps.
So yes, there is good reason to bash Romney... He wanted to reinstate the same Bush policies which put our country into this mess to begin with.
My thought: the Republicans say that they, with their business backgrounds, are so much better at running organizations that they ought to be given control of the country so they can run it right. Well, if this is an example of how organizations work when the GOP are running them, do we really want the entire country run this way?
n/t
The first few days were shock because they were so immersed in their Potemkin world view they had no clue they were going to lose. The, it turned into anger at all the "idiots" who voted for Obama. Now, they've started an orchestrated denial campaign coming up with all sorts of REAL reasons they lost. I'm sure this stage will rapidly devolve into conspiracy theories.
I'm on a sports forum filled with Republicans and they've been going through all these stages. I haven't gloated, but I point out all their flawed arguments (on gas prices and the so-called Obama Dow dip on Wednesday) and I've probably been ignore listed by 10 people in about 2-3 days.
He lost, get over it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The Republicans are blaming everyone else but themselves. They've gone as far as to blame blacks for voting for the party that doesn't have candidates that publish books claiming that slavery was a "blessing in disguise."
Romney lost because:
1. He's slimy. He was an Etch-A-Sketch candidate.
2. Rather than court the independents that could have won the election for him, he courted the fringe. He picked that lunatic Ryan for VP.
3. He thought he was using the neocons. Wrong. The neocons used him. They were going to glom on to anyone who won the primaries and anyone paying attention saw this.
4. Because of #1, nobody could trust him, not even his fellow Republicans and certainly not Roger Ailes. Remember how Fox tried to hilight everyone except him before the primaries were done and then had to reluctantly back him after?
5. Not even the Mormons trusted him.
6. He even lost his hometown of Belmont MA, which is full of rich WASPs just like him.
People who know him didn't trust him. It showed.
Combine that with the utter vile rhetoric coming from GOP the last 4 years, is it any surprise that everyone with two brain cells to rub together disliked him far more than they did Obama?
Out of all the candidates that were backed by Roger Ailes' SuperPac, none won. Just look at the clown show that the primaries were, and the GOP picked a clown as a result.
Introspection is required. Until then, it's going to be a long cold winter of discontent for the GOP.
--
BMO
This is pure speculation, but I can see the Linux open source crowd fitting the Democrat infrastructure, and the Windows corporate crowd on the Republican side. If you want your tech problems solved sooner and under budget, get the old-timer with a beard in jeans, and you too could be President.
.
Don't have to. Romney promised that he was going to get rid of FEMA once he got elected. That phrase certainly haunted him this last week prior to election day as Sandy's aftermath led almost all reporters to keep asking Romney about his FEMA comments. (!)
:>)
From elsewhere:
mrshowrules [TotalFark] 2012-10-30 12:44:56 PM
List of People Conspiring Against the GOP, and therefore, America
(LOPCATGOPATA for short):
Liberals, Democrats, Socialists, Community Organizers, Geologists, Biologists, Meteorologists, Climatologists, Atheists, Muslims, Jews, Satan, ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, PBS, All of cable news except FNC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, The Guardian, Black People, Mexicans, Human Rights Activists, SCOTUS, Europe, Movie Industry, Television Industry, Environmentalists, ACLU, The United Nations, Labor Unions, Colleges, Teachers (including kindergarten teachers), Professors, ACORN, National Endowment for the Arts, Gays, Judges, NPR, Paleontologists, Astrophysicists, Museums (*except Creationism Museum), WHO, WTO, Inflated tires, The Honolulu Advertiser, The Star Bulletin, Teletubbies, Sponge Bob and Patrick, Nobel Prize Committee, US Census Bureau, NOAA, Sesame Street, Comic Books, Little Green Footballs, Video Games, The Bible, CBO, Bruce Springsteen, Pennies, The Theory of Relativity, Comedy Central, Young People, whatever the hell a Justin Beiber is, Small Business Owners, Math, CPAC, Navy SEALs, The Economist, The Muppets, Iowa Republicans, Low-Flow Toilets, Breast Cancer Screenings, Chrysler, Clint Eastwood., Robert Deniro, Tom Hanks, Glenn Frey, Norman Rockwell, James Cameron, Dr. Seus, Nuns, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, Jonathan Krohn at age 17, Fact Checkers, Australia, Mitt Romney, Rasmussen, Fox News, Lockheed Martin, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Paul Ryan, Debate moderators, Ben Stein, Soup kitchens, Chris Christie
And now we can add "The IT Department" to the list.
--
BMO
In all honesty it wasn't there fault.
The truth of the matter is that it was God's will.
They do, but the rednecks use them to reinforce their Foxtardliness.
Yes, White Trash vote GOP. I live among them and your post is no Troll.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If the Democrats did this then they would be accused of violating your privacy .. link
AccountKiller
No seriously, it's really remarkable that counting hasn't even finished, yet the loser already knows who exactly is to blame for losing. Hint: not him, not other higher-ups in the party, not his party's politics. It's some tech's fault, obviously!
There's a long list of Republicans who claim their god would give them office.
Either they're all mentally ill or their god isn't real.
Maybe both.
Have gnu, will travel.
As reality always shows, these idiots only care for themselves. choosing to blame the victims in order to pretend that they have any sense of integrity.
In my first campaign, we selected voter households for GOTV by hand-sorting punch-cards and then having the computer guy make a tape and run out labels and precinct lists with shared (actually bootleg) time on a bank mainframe and a line printer.
So, all due respect, I know more about campaigns and elections after 38 of them than most slashdot posters. I also know that some of you hate the GOP and some of you return the sentiment with interest.
But I know next to nothing about network computing except as a consumer. Any chance of redirecting this conversation from what I know about to what you know about?
What was the deal with Romney's data processing? Were those management problems created by marketing/management guys like me, or were they technical fuckups by the IT guys? And what lessons can future campaign managers learn?
.
... IT gets blamed for everything.
or - to make any assumptions about anyone without reviewing their skillset is vastly off the mark?
I would not vote for YOU sir
Off the fact that the Republican platform was bigoted, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-latino, anti-african american, anti-environmental, anti-science, mixed with a large does of religious crazy.
I've got news for you. Your IT department wasn't why you lost the young vote. Your get out the vote failing wasn't what scared away the Latino vote. And believe me, canvasing poorly wasn't what kept African Americans from voting for you.
The angry white man thing won't work anymore because us "those people" now outnumber you, permanently (thank goodness!).
How is this different from if a person got a credit card and ran up bills and then refused to pay and went into bankruptcy? I think most people would call someone who did that "immoral'' and ''a crook" if they charged things which they had no intention of paying off... It's almost like corporate identity theft done with the intention of looting the good-na,me and credit of the company you buy out. Yet, if you do that with a company that's called a good business tactic to maximize profit; if you do it as an individual it's called immoral and "stealing from the credit card company".
bullshit, most Nazi technology e.g. aircraft was superior.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a famous short story about how a galactic empire was broken by its wartime quest for the ultimate weapon.
In WWII the US had its super weapon in the atomic bomb.
But its primary focus was on the mass production of ships, planes, weapons, radios and so on in numbers that would have an immediate impact on the war effort.
And they antagonize me. Mind you, I am fundamentalist humanist. And a socialist.
Quit generalizing, not all old farts are the same, we just smell the same.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm always amazed at how *intolerant* leftists can be. I live in a rural "redneck" community and we have very little crime, pollution, racism and unemployment here. Our schools are ranked some of the highest in the nation and just about everyone I know graduated college. Maybe we're not as dumb as the stereotype you submit to says we are.
lmao...we're supposed to take all that at face value with no links to statistics for where you live, let alone the actual location. I call shenanigans. Where is this place, Republican Fantasyland?
...is their obnoxious robot phone calls. During the lead up to the election I was getting an average of three a day with peaks of ten a day. I kept a list of the candidates who did this and voted AGAINST them. They wasted my time and got punished for it. Every candidate who did this to me LOST. I bet they pissed off a lot of other people.
This is what happens when you hire someone based in ideology. The GOP has a history of hiring half wit acolytes, who get where they are by falling upwards. The ORCA debacle is no exception.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
The GOP still cannot fathom that they ran a campaign based on lies and smears, with no substance whatsoever, and Mitt was a liar and a thief. The GOP got slammed because they lie and steal, and have 35 year long track record of it. EOS
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
This guy says nothing of substance, and has no reasoning ability or logic, nor facts to back up his assertions, with out resorting to name calling as a defense. So he does as all Goopers do when they are cornered- throws a hissy fit and leaves. Proof once again he can't back up what he says.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
...for the party that's the choice of morons.
That disconnect isn't just "our" perception of how the right wing thinks. This statement (attributed to Karl Rove, I think universally) was not delivered in a casual context, not responding to a shouted question, it was a sit-down lengthy interview with a New York Times reporter.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
The contempt and (by us liberals' standards) insanity he displays is open, intentional and utter. Regardless, his meltdown on election night and the right wing's complete bafflement at their failure fit that picture exactly. That's Rove was revealing how right-wingers think the world works. That's Romney thinking he can lie with every word out of his mouth. That's their pollsters looking at hard data thinking they can change the results by denying them. That's their voters, who really do think believing what they're told and repeating it loud enough is magic that makes it true.
There's a large part of the GOP who think they're not completely sucked in to this mindset, who think they're just being practical by cultivating that vote, who imagine themselves, without the least sense of irony, creators.
That's not my word for what they think, it's theirs.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
And those people are very often filled with hate and an authoritarian streak a mile wide.
Authoritarian streak, I'll grant. Hate? No. Well, there are some, I suppose, like Westboro Baptist, but the vast majority, and the LDS church in particular, are about love. Homosexuals who don't really understand the LDS position on homosexuality will disagree, but they're wrong.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I was hoping for an intelligent discussion about the I.T. technologies used by the two campaigns, and instead I find the same old waste of time war of words going on where liberals insult conservatives in the most hateful of ways, calling them names, and conservatives shout back with alleged facts and no references. Is it not possible for anyone to move beyond this? Seems to me the "great uniter" we elected in 2008 has divided all of us against ourselves in an irreconcilable way. It didn't take much to do this.
Murphy was an optimist