ORCA Flop

[crashtestdummy]

So the Republicans had a secret get-out-the-vote project they called ORCA that was supposed to be a big game changer. Basically, the plan was to computerize the old-fashioned "strike lists". It had already been reported that ORCA was a major failure, but it's not coming out just how laughably bad it really was.

Some choice bits:

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

At 6:30AM on Tuesday, I went to the polls. I was immediately turned away because I didn't have my poll watcher certificate. Many, many people had this problem. The impression I got was this was taken care of because they had "registered me". Others were as well. But apparently, I was supposed to go on my own to a Victory Center to pick it up, but that was never communicated properly.

Next, and this part I find mind-boggingly absurd, the web address was located at "https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca". Notice the "s" after http. This denotes it's a secure connection, something that's used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn't auto-forward the regular "http" to "https" and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down. Setting up forwarding is the simplest thing in the world and only takes seconds, but they failed to do it. This is compounded by the fact that mobile browsers default to "http" when you just start with "www" (as 95% of the world does).

For someone who who ran on the platform of being an efficient and effective manager, this is really embarrassing. How could you put out a system like this without doing simple trial runs months ahead? This isn't even a very complicated web app to design and implement. Yikes.

 

[techs]

It's not just that the Republicans policy is living in the 1950's apparently so is their technology.

I guess if they just had a few under 30's around.....but hey, old white guys rule.

 

[mshan]

I remember reading that Obama GOTV ground troops were using smart phones to enter data on the fly into central databases, while Romney GOTV troops were still using paper and pencil.

There is apparently an article in Time magazine that Obama campaign had created a database of 29,000 potential voters in Ohio (0.5% sample size) and could watch what they responded to and what was important to them and what it would take to get them to the poll: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755883/vp/49754159#49754159

Plus they apparently had something like 100,000 gotv troops on the ground on election day, and 200,000 making gotv efforts on the phones.

Guess it is like Romney leading his troops into battle in World War I and not realizing that Obama's troops now had machine guns...

 

[Phokus]

The GOP campaign was so badly mismanaged. Why on earth should we give them any power in the government when they screwup so badly like this?

That and their absolute disdain for statistics and instead using their 'guts' to interpret polls is reason enough to keep them far far far away from government office.

 

[techs]

I would like to mention that I don't think its as important to Republicans since they already turn out a higher proportion of their supporters than the Democrats.
I think they are near their maximum turnout.
Dems have always suffered from the problem of low proportional turnout. Which means they have a huge potential base of supporters who are potential voters.

And thanks to the Republican 20 year history of racism, mismangement and failure they have now put those Dems in play.

 

[mshan]

video clip: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755883/vp/49754159#49754159

Time magazine article (29,000 person in state of Ohio alone database): http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/0...ants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

Basically, Obama facebook'd the Romney campaign!

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. “We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,” explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.

On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media."

Predicting Turnout

"The magic tricks that opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October’s choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. “We were much calmer than others,” said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. “We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

"Online, the get-out-the-vote effort continued with a first-ever attempt at using Facebook on a mass scale to replicate the door-knocking efforts of field organizers. In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to vote, voting early or getting to the polls. The campaign found that roughly 1 in 5 people contacted by a Facebook pal acted on the request, in large part because the message came from someone they knew."

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/0...crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2Bk9ZyntO

 

[mshan]

"it was described as a mega-app for smartphones that would link the more than 30,000 operatives and volunteers involved in get-out-the-vote efforts. PBS profiled it a few days before the election. The app was created and managed by the Romney campaign and was kept a secret among a close circle in Boston, according to POLITICO sources. It was supposed to be incredibly efficient and allow the campaign to streamline, from its War Room at the Garden in Boston, the efforts to maximize turnout of Romney backers.

State officials were kept in the dark about exactly how it would work in the lead-up to Election Day, and there was never a dry run that included early voting, said one of the sources.

Among other issues, the system was never beta-tested or checked for functionality without going live before Election Day, two sources said. It went live that morning but was never checked for bugs or efficiencies internally. The volunteer at Ace of Spades also cited this issue but as one by which field workers couldn't get to know the system ahead of Election Day. But inside Romneyland, officials were experiencing similar problems as votes were being cast.

In other words, it was not the field element that was the problem, it was the machine that was supposed to be coordinating everything and churning through data to allow the teams to make precision efforts. Instead, as one source said, it was like landing a plane "without instruments."

Campaign aides insisted to reporters throughout the day that reports across Twitter that ORCA was problem-plagued were wrong."

"It's been reported the system crashed at 4 p.m., but multiple sources familiar with the war room operation said it had actually been crashing throughout the day.

Officials mostly got information about votes either from public news sources tracking data, like CNN.com, or by calling the counties for information, the source said.

Officials insisted the day after the election that they had still believed they were close, and that they had hit their numbers where they needed to, even as Fox News and other outlets called the race."

http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns...s-fail-whale-orca-the-votetracker-149098.html

 

[IlllI]

it was posted on yahoo too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mitt-romneys-campaign-completely-fell-195408549.html

 

[mshan]

From the Yahoo article you just linked:

"And the Romney campaign's Election Day problems weren't limited to ORCA. Another Republican activist, an attorney in Hamilton County, Ohio who declined to be named for fear of "burning bridges," told Business Insider that the campaign's GOTV organization in that crucial swing county completely collapsed in the weeks leading up to the election.

In an interview last week, the attorney, one of the "Lawyers for Romney" who volunteered to help the campaign's legal team by watching the polls on Election Day, described how the Romney campaign sent its legal volunteers the wrong training information, failed to provide volunteers with information about where they were supposed to be on Election Day, and stopped responding to phone calls and emails in the final two weeks of the campaign.

"It was basically a disaster," the attorney said. "They never explained what we were supposed to be doing — where we were supposed to start, where we were supposed to end, what I was supposed to do at the end of the night — they didn't explain any of it.... A month before, you couldn't get a phone call or an email answered."

"Four out of eight of my polling places didn't have a poll observer," the attorney continued. "How you don't even get people credentialed properly is beyond my comprehension."

 

[techs]

In 2016 the Republicans new GOTV plan will be called "Unicorn"

 

[Moonbeam]

Can we not get too carried away turning Obama into God. There's still a lot of folk who need jobs.

 

[Thump553]

I've worked a couple of campaigns as a Dem in various foot soldier capacities similar to those described above. Dems have encountered nearly all the same problems described above but with one significant difference. EVERY time I've encountered a bug (like the missing poll watcher certificate described in post 1, happened to me in 2004) I always had at least one immediate supervisor to call who would move heaven and earth to fix the problem-and who would then check all similarly situated people to see if they had the same problem.

A big difference I think is that above the ground troop level most of the GOP are paid, and frequently paid quite good. For Dems it's either all volunteers or college kids paid just enough to stay alive while they worked 80+ hours a week, at least until you get up to the state director level.

Both campaigns did the sort of ORCA thing and much more this time around. The Obama campaign kept the development all in-house, the GOP used very expensive consultants to try to reach the same result.

NPR had a brief story about this just before the election, essentially saying both sides had revolutionized what they did as compared to the past, drawing the analogy to baseball and the money ball versus the old scouts system. I'm anxiously waiting a good book to summarize what actually resulted-that book will be the Game Change of this election cycle.