On election night, Twitter may have finally slain the Fail Whale. But another sprung from the depths to wreak havoc with the Mitt Romney campaign.
This one was an Orca.
As the presidential race reached a climax, the Romney campaign had a plan. Campaign volunteers would monitor polling stations in swing states and report back to the headquarters on who had already voted. The Republican Party would use this data to target citizens who had yet to show up to the polls.
This "strike list" strategy has long been used by both Democrats and Republicans, but the Romney campaign wanted to add a high tech twist: Poll monitors would enter the names via their smartphones, providing the campaign with quicker access to the data. There was even a button for reporting voter fraud or other election problems. They called it Project Orca.
Orca is another name for killer whale.
The campaign had high hopes. "There's nothing that the Obama data team, there's nothing that the Obama campaign, there's nothing that President Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here," the Huffington Post quoted Romney Deputy Political Director Dan Centinello saying during a training call for volunteers before the election.
But according to Romney volunteers that have taken to the web in the days since the election, things didn't go quite as planned.
According to anonymous source from within the Romney campaign cited by Joel B. Pollak -- a writer for the conservative publication Breitbart -- the campaign gave out incorrect PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, meaning none of them could login to submit their lists. A new set of PINs was generated, but those didn't work either.
"The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left," the source told Pollak.
In a post of his own, conservative blogger, web developer and Project Orca volunteer John Ekdahl discusses the many problems with the system -- both technical and organizational. For example, users weren't able to test the app before election day, and many didn't realize that it was a mobile-optimized web app, not an app that could be downloaded from the Android Market or Apple App Store. Also, the web app required users to enter HTTPS -- not just HTTP -- in front of the URL.
"This denotes it's a secure connection, something that's used for e-commerce and web-based e-mail," Ekdahl explains. "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."
Ekdahl writes that many volunteers were turned away for not carrying their poll-watcher certificates -- a piece of information that volunteers had been erroneously led to believe they would not need. Also, volunteers were expected to print out their own 60-page resource packets on their home computers -- something they didn't know until 4 p.m. the day before the election.
"I was thankfully able to find a Kinko's open until 11 p.m. that was able to print it out and bind it for me, but this is not something I should have had to do," Ekdahl writes. "They expected 75- to 80-year-old veteran volunteers to print out 60-plus pages on their home computers?"
Although some liberal bloggers feared Project Orca would be used as a voter suppression tool, the Huffington Post notes that the volunteer training packet specifically forbids volunteers to "talk to or confront voters in any circumstances." Instead, Breitbart suggests that the tool ended up suppressing Romney's vote.
"In fact, Orca diverted scarce resources that would have been better used physically moving voters to polling places. By a rough calculation, Romney lost the election by falling 500,000 to 700,000 votes short in key swing states. If each of the 37,000 volunteers that had been devoted to Orca had instead brought 20 voters to the polls in those states over the course of the day, Romney would have won the election."
But in an interview with Huffington Post, Scott Goodstein, the external online director for the Obama campaign in 2008 and the founder of Revolution Messaging, doubts whether the strike list strategy would have made a huge difference at the end of the campaign anyway. "Will an additional auto-call last minute really make a difference in a market like Northeast Ohio, which has been saturated for three months full of auto-calls?" he asks.
The real impact may be on the volunteers themselves. "The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that," Ekdahl concludes.
Project Orca. The name suits. But in ways the campaign didn't exactly expect.
