We celebrated when Romney lost, but the USA dodged a bullet. He decided on a project to digitize voter lists for poll watchers to check off who had voted. Republicans who hadn't shown up would be called and encouraged. All would be automatically run from Central headquarters in Boston, bypassing the locals.
The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA by an ordinary GOP volunteer says, "From the very start there were warning signs. Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like 'Has this been stress tested?', 'Is there redundancy in place?'" Then he describes how Mitt was not just a RINO- but the secret agent from Massachusetts who hired a bunch of clowns(thieves?).
I missed the scoop on this story, but my point is not the damage Romney did to himself, but the harm he inflicted on the GOP. Democrats got elected and die hard Republicans vowed never to volunteer again- all thanks to Mitt.
Orca was designed to work on cellphones, laptops and tablets, but it was untested on Election Day. And it crashed. And kept crashing.
30,000 volunteers rose early to get to the polls. Not part of their instructions was that they needed a 'poll watcher certificate' only available from the local headquarters. Hours later, when they were allowed into the polls, they tried logging onto the web app- "Access Denied". Called up the big Boston headquarters and couldn't get through. Finally, contact established, legitimate password obtained, they logged on and started.
But, it wasn't easy for a single person to handle a thousand names with a lousy interface. One school had different precincts in two buildings, but only one person assigned. Then the machine crashed. Call Boston again- they tell us that only N. Carolina has crashed. Meanwhile the help desk people in a different pods are being told that only Ohio, or only Florida, or only Pennsylvania are down.
The 600 comments tell a tale of frustration and anger. This GOP official explains how ORCA's destruction badly affected down ticket races.
567 I am the Chairman for my County Republican Committee, and Vice Chair of our Congressional District Committee. Alarm bells were ringing like mad for me since September. We went the whole month of September with no signs or collateral for all of southeastern Virginia. I begged and begged RPV for a "hard R list" for our congressional candidate to work from, but no "voter vault" or list was provided. Try running a congressional campaign with no voter data. Finally got a small wierd list from RPV. Most of my committee was not even on it. After many days of questioning I found out the list was people who had volunteered on Romney's web page. The Congressional campaign tried using this list to get voluteers and GOTV, but got many hangups and "why are you calling me, I'm a democrat!" I begged RPV for the usual list of registered voters sorted by precinct, but was told all of that was coming from Romney. It never did. We are used to assigning our volunteers to work inside and outside polls ourselves. With ORCA, we had no idea who would be where, or if the polls were covered or not. None of the trainingon the calls was state specific. We set up our own training, not knowing who the volunteers would be!I was finally able to find out Saturday before the election who had been assigned where. Half of my polls were not covered. I contacted the volunteers who had been assigned to polls and got them to forward their pdf packets to me for printing. That is the only way I was able to get a copy of the voter rolls. I begged for the unassigned precincts to be assigned to me so that I could at least have the voter rollls. (we have house of delegates elections next year and I need those damn lists!!!!) I was informed that the campaign had moved beyond assigning polls. After more begging someone from the campaign sent me a complete list, but after opening it, the list was just census data for every resident of the county. All ov my volunteers had problems with the "app". My opinion? A total attempt to bypass and alienate the existing party structure. They were going to show us how its done. How did that work out for you, a$$holes?
Let
Redstate have the final word.