Horror stories up over at Ace. Geez Louise.

I started to volunteer for this effort, but all the initial training talked about was smart phone apps (which I don't have), so I dropped out. Once again, the Republicans outsmarted themselves.

I volunteered, took the training, then tried to call in to the final conference call on Monday night. Couldn't get in. About 10 minutes past the start time, I got a call that connected me...just in time to hear the wrap up.

Never got any info on where to be, or when I would get the app, and how to be certified.

Frustrated, I went to the Romney Victory/FAIL Center and made calls the rest of the day with my son. Other than Paul Ryan stopping by, it was a complete waste of time.

As an IT person, the technical term we use for this starts with "cluster".

Today, my lefty uncle in The Shire was crowing about knocking on doors all day. Low tech. Old school. Works every time.

Tuesday I worked on Orca from 6:45 a.m. until the poll closing at 7 p.m. Some of what this article is saying does ring true to me, but I saw plenty of other problems too. Here's my experience:

I participated in the conference calls, which happened once every couple of weeks, probably starting in August or September. Although they were short on specifics, I live and die by my iPhone, so it all made sense to me, and I felt that if the web-based app was well-designed and user-friendly, I'd be fine with it. During the calls, participants could ask questions. The questions asked made it apparent that many volunteers were not smart phone or tablet users. We were told that names could be written down and called in by those volunteers. I envisioned a system with multiple Orca workers in each precinct to facilitate this calling system.

A couple of weeks before the election, I noticed that my Orca emails had stopped. I sent several emails to the organizer, who at first urged me to be patient, and finally told me that the program was full and I wouldn't be needed. I worried at this point that they hadn't included the most tech-savvy volunteers. I was disappointed, but was just going to work on the GOTV end of things at Victory HQ.

On Monday, I sat next to a nice volunteer while making GOTV calls. She mentioned that she was supposed to do Orca the next day, but that her legally required poll-watching credential hadn't arrived. I heard that many volunteers in our area had the same problem. Because I had a credential from early poll-watching and had done the Orca live-training, it was decided by the supervisor I would go instead. This was a good decision.

Con't.:
The app didn't go live until 5 a.m. election morning. There was a video you could watch to prepare. I arrived at the polls at 6:45 and got to work. The app worked great, and for a couple of hours, I was inputting names like a machine. At around 9:30, the system went down. I had to go outside to call tech support and it took me a while to get back up (a couple of hours or so). In the meantime, another Orca worker and I wrote down all of the names and when the app came back up, I slammed them in fast. The other Orca worker didn't stay past lunch time, but he helped when things were tough. Two other regular poll-watchers from the GOP side showed up at odd times and were sent to other precincts.

Mid-afternoon, I was diverted to a new, largely minority precinct where no assigned poll-watchers or Orca volunteers had shown up. It was bedlam and ballots were definitely being illegally cast (unauthorized assistance, shady ID's, etc.) I went there for a while and returned to my original precinct to watch the end of the day, ballots into the car, etc. By then, I thought Orca efforts at our Florida call centers would be focused on Iowa, Ohio and Colorado, so I just let the end of the day unfold. The polls were very quiet by then, very few voters in the largely white precinct.

In addition to Orca tech glitches, I definitely saw disorganization in assigning poll workers and an unresponsive (overworked) trouble-shooting support system in the county Victory HQ. Orca did take up volunteers, but since I also functioned as the sole poll-watcher all day at one precinct, it probably didn't matter.

None of it mattered, I suppose.

RNC and Romney ignored the Tea Party movement.

I am guessing there was no dress rehearsal for this so Team Lady Parts wouldn't get wise.

My IT instincts were telling me something was wrong when a volunteer knocked on my door Sunday and said she had also volunteered but heard nothing.

I am guessing many people in the ORCA project knew it was a train wreck, but kept their mouths shut hoping for the best on Tuesday.

When I think that RR campaign ignored the Tea Party and conservative media, it's no wonder we lost. The Democrats concentrated on the base. We concentrated on the Independents and mushy-middle folks. Mark Levin had all the conservative stars on his program the last year. He wanted to give them a 15-20 minute uninterrupted, non-hostile forum to reach voters. If you listen to Mark, as I do occasionally, he gets lots of young libs listening and calling. Mark tried for 2 yrs. to get Romney on air. I do not believe he ever got the courtesy of an RSVP.

Well then this was a test of Romney's real business abilities, and maybe it's a good thing he lost.

I say this as a US STEM worker disgusted by Romney's position that we should bring in more H-1Bs to steal American jobs. What do you bet that's just who developed this system, and exactly why it failed.

Yes, Obama is no better, but we don't expect any better of Obama, do we.

What an utter disaster! You would have thought the way he ran the Olympics, he would have had better organization. He certainly had the money to do it. It almost feels like a total waste of time and money. Thanks though to all who volunteered.

Somewhere between 65 and 80+% of all IT projects fail. These maroons showed up on election day with an apparently poorly (if at all), load tested app which even if it had worked would have still tied up poll workers doing stuff that could have been better done with a pencil and a piece of paper.

They brought a smart phone to a gunfight.

We really are the luzer party.

If Orca was based in liberal Boston, maybe they sabatoged the system. That sounds like a nightmare. His campaign should have had a better handle on things. That's what he was paying them to do.

Thanks to all who volunteered. I did old-fashioned GOTV from '92 - '08. Orca sounds like a good idea - just not sufficiently tested beforehand.

But even if Orca had worked smoothly...
in retrospect, it looks to me as if our side's election day GOTV concept could not have beat the Dems' superior "ground game."

What the Dems did was to brilliantly manipulate the "early vote" process, instead of waiting until election day for their main GOTV push.

First, the Obama/Axelrod machine targeted their most marginal potential supporters --weeks ahead of time-- assembled them at pizza parties etc ... and then bused them off en masse to vote early.

Our side scoffed at this. We tend to like traditional election-day voting, and were overconfident that our voters would "crawl over broken glass" to get to the polls.

Sadly, the Obamaites simply out-hustled us with the early voting thing.

Daily KOS predicted the exact results... ve Gallup ??? Maybe because they knew Obama added 10.1 m new voters and Gallup did not.

If anyone cares, there should be an analysis of who the 10.1m voters are.

We need to vote via phone or email. If tv shows can allow only 1 vote per call or computer choice, why not vote that way?

Voters from Ca., Chicago & NY registered in Red States as residents. They didn't move there, just voted multiple times. Our system has been Chicagofornicated.

VII, this pretty much shows that to be true.

Lame Cherry blog, October 8. Linked from Ulsterman Report... Shut up, move on. Or Not.

Inside undermining to a level of sabotage. Makes way more sense than any of the nonsensical explanations and fingerpointing going on between republicans right now.

Impossible? Black helicopter stuff? Funny, that's exactly what Joe Sixpack democrat is saying about Benghazi.

Actually Bo had 8 million or so less votes and Romney had 3 mil less than Mcpain.So both campaigns did not turned out the vote as good as you may think.The brilliant 3 mil conservatives that stayed home because of the Mormon thing elected BO.

Is anyone else still getting emails from the Romney campaign? I continue to have them delivered to my inbox...all stale dated. I got one from John McCain this morning, and one from Ann Romney late yesterday, both urging me to vote on Tues. so weird.

Honestly, it makes me feel like they were purposely held up somewhere.

I'm in Kentucky so we were taken for granted and that's okay. But if I hadn't been a political junkie, I wouldn't have known that Romney was running for anything. There were no commercials. I never saw any interviews on TV. I saw no signs. He never came here or if he did I wasn't informed. Nothing. I signed up for twitter and followed the Romney campaign. (Was that part of ORCA?) I got probably one lame tweet a day.

Now I have a country that has been barried and will be surrounded by arrogant, gloating hippies until the day I die. Gee thanks.

Also, the military vote is being openly suppressed. The potential for Republicans is incredible. Why do they do nothing about that? They know it beforehand, they have plenty of time to fix it, why don't they? Why do they allow the Dems to suppress our military? By the time the Republican will get it fixed, the military will be a shell of its former self and will be exactly what the Dems want it to be...a banana republic military.

#17 - My first thought was of that Ulsterman Report. Romney and his staff were supposed to be top notch, and we were assured that the GOTV was being covered.

The level of these screw ups go beyond a slap-dash untested app: two states (that we know of) received 100% wrong PINs, lengthly support response times, spinning and covering to their volunteers that its OK other places. To me this is evidence of the White House Insiders suspicion that the fix was in for Obama and both parties were in collusion.

I no longer have a country. I just live here.

I smell a rat.

Call me naive - Naive - but who in the ____ needed a GOTV effort to vote against Obama? By what measure did 3 mil less voters come our for the Repubs? The Republicans should have been able to pull a random name from any phone book and won this in Reaganesque fashion.

#19 I got an email from Paul Ryan this morning!

Enough! I am sick to death of hearing about how we lost the country and what a terrible campaign Romney ran. Once again the conservatives have formed a circular firing squad. The almighty punditry claims we have to abandon principle to ever win another election. Get a grip. Obama didn't win because Romney's volunteers had mixed up passwords. Obama won for three reasons: DECEPTION. FRAUD. IGNORANCE. Obama lied about Romney and got away with it. He lied about his own record, his own plans and beliefs and got away with it. We are also expected to believe that turnout was supressed and Romney got fewer votes than McCain. No. Way. The polls, Romney's crowds and reports from the field showed that Republicans were motivated and dems were not. Somehow those republican votes were switched or dumped. Ignorance? Too many voters didn't know enough about either candidate to make a sound decision.

Put your flags back up. We have work to do. We must find a way to get our message out. Get rid of McConnell and Boehner. They are ineffective and unappealing. Keep talking to people. We are part of the groundgame. Expose Obama's lies. There are moneyed conservative who could expand balanced media outlets. Fix our voting system. If Trump wants to be relevent then he should offer an award to people who come forward with evidence of massive fraud. We can overcome deception, fraud, and ignorance once we acknowledge that they are the problems.

isn't "orca" the name of a boat that sank in a movie once?

I live in NE Florida and I got tons of get out the vote calls by the Republican party. The problem in Florida was NOT the effort. It was all of the Yankees in southern Florida who brought their politics and attitudes. Many other Yankees there are grifters, on "disability" but holding full time jobs or else imported Hispanics (non Cuban) who believe in the politics of racial division and get free stuff. How else to rationally explain Debbie the Mouth.

The other areas are where you find universities. Nothing else need to be said about that.

The creation of the electoral college, while brilliant in its inception, could not foresee the tyranny of high density population centers within a state that run contrary to the rest of the state.

So sad that the looters won. All you have to do is listen to Tromka, the Union Boss, who is salivating at card check and raiding the Treasury.

Quick follow. Did Conservatives/TEA Party voters really not show up because they were ignored? Or because Romney was a Mormon? I didn't even need to know the candidate's name. I was showing up on Tuesday to vote for whomever was running against Barry the Fraud and the Chicago communist machine and take my chances later. And I knew that 4 years ago.

Stunning stuff, both the original article and the stories here as posts.

We have fallen through a wormhole into an alternate reality. There is no ''level'' any more. To know that the Republican Party, the GOP as it's called, has failed us so completely as to have rendered ITSELF useless.

New party anyone? We need a new country. ''When in the course of human events....''

I worked on ORCA, and everything said in the article was true, wonderful in conception, disastrous in execution. No cooperation or coordination with local party (my wife is Chair of the local country Republicans, and I know this to be true.) It was a disaster, particularly compared to the smooth efficient Rove directed operation for Bush 2004. I wonder whether there was sabotage.

But then again, when there's a 95% turnout in a Philadelphia precinct before 10 am (and before the Republican observers were admitted by judicial order), what can one do? Where I live, in rural Pennsylvania, the turnout was 65-70% in the farm/exurb areas and 45-50% in the town; the former went over 60% for Romney, the latter 50-60% for O... but what can you do when there are 500,000 to 90,000 in Philly?

Thank you #26...well said!!

#29, I don't think the posters are saying that the Tea Party did not show up to vote; they are saying that the Romney campaign ignored them in the organization of GOTV efforts, ignoring those networks and the mass of volunteers. From what I saw, the Tea Party folks were working hard in my area on their own. I really do not know if the Romney campaign contacted any of them. Of course, I live in Texas and it is taken for granted as a red state and presidential candidates only come to this state to raise money, not to campaign.

I don't think Romney lost. I think the networks were poised to announce Obama won by the 10 o'clock news. Within a half hour, Obama went from about 180 electoral votes to over 300. Most of the western states were still voting or had just finished. FL wasn't even counted and boom, all of them said Obama won, then went back to regular programming. We've been had!

One of my sons volunteered in a low-tech Romney call center in GOP-neglected PA. He made thousands of calls and never heard of Orca, but he had an ominous feeling from the responses he was getting that people were envious and resentful of Romney--even when they were not for Obama. Also, he disliked the scripts and polling questions he was given--which he was told came from the Romney headquarters in DC. He felt very positive about Romney as an honorable, brilliant man who loves this country, and was daily stunned by calling people who could not see that.

Is this Project Orca something I'm supposed to have heard of? Jeeze

Ok let's get back to this story. This is a software tool that is designed to identify who has voted and who hasn't among your base.

The idea is to allow you to reach out to those people you know will vote for you if they haven't and make sure you turn them out.

In order for it to work, you need to get the data of people who have voted in and others need to see it and then reach out to the people who haven't and get them to the polls.

If the software fails for any reason, you don't get another shot at reaching those people and you don't know if they actually voted or not.

The results show Romney received 2 or 3 million less votes than McCain.

That's the difference in the election.

Based on this, an alternative could have been deployed and you would have gotten those people to vote.

I've used this software (different firm) on an iPad at the polls. They all generally have the same idea to track the voters.

continued...


If you can't get the data back to HQ and they can't identify the list of people who haven't voted, then you have no way to know who to contact and who may have voted and you spin your wheels.

This Orca program was not a well executed idea IMHO. The program I used was designed to work on an iPad and the size is manageable. Doing it on an iPhone is really too small and in the end if it's not working over regular phone lines (3G) then it's a disaster in the making.

I'm shocked the Romney campaign fouled this up but hate to say it, but it may have cost Mr. Romney the election.

Mitt is a man who I learned to respect not for only his competence and ability but because he was a darn decent American.

Now we'll never know what kind of President we could have had.

The alternative I fear is far, far worse.

The RNC and Romney ignored the Tea Party because the Dims told them to, and they told them to because they're scared spitless of the Tea Party.

Those who are blaming this on fraud are as deluded as the Democrats who think we can just pass a tax increase and everything will come up roses: the numbers don't lie.

I hope and pray that this fiasco will finally rid the party of the Karl Rove cabal. This is the man who let the media forever defame W as 1) a man who "lied and people died" (!) and 2) a racist who let black people drown in LA. (!)

As Jennifer Rubin correctly theorizes in her WaPo article yesterday, we need a much smarter, savier, techier management on the Right. And we've got to start kicking the media IN THE TEETH everyday in their lying and propagandizing.

I know a man and his sister that volunteered to go into the Cleveland ghetto to work together at a polling place there with ORCA. The Sunday before, the (big) man was told to report to our suburban, never-any-problems polling place and his sister was told they didn't need her! She had taken off of work to help out - how could they move him from where the campaign needed him most, and dis his sister?

Then he told me on Tues., the ORCA apps didn't work, and they resorted to pencil and paper, but out here in Republican suburbia, he noted that the other side had operatives checking the lists and running out to get the voters that hadn't shown up yet.

I don't usually put alot of weight behind GOTV efforts, I figure if someone is interested, they shouldn't need a push to get to the polls, but this was a disaster - wasn't it tested? Boston should have let the locals handle their own.

The Lord has a plan... I don't know what it is --but -- if God is for me -- who can be against me.....

The democrats have to seen something. I don't know what it is -- but -- I think WE're about to see.

obama flies off to Asia while the country crumbles -- that includes democrats -- so let the senate with reid/rod do the country's work and solve the problems. The affirmative action pres will be celebrating with a "load" of his friends and hangers/on jetting alllllll over the world..

Back to work harry....

Note to Americans: go to work to pay your taxes so the "won" can have his vacation and the applause of the world. The world leaders didn't have to invade America to destroy US -- all they had to do was endorse obama and he'll take the country down for them....

LZK

# 7 hit it right on the head! They slapped the Tea-Party members right across the face at their convention. What a great way to get the most enthusiastic segment of the party motivated. /s

Wow, this is so maddening. My sister volunteered for Orca in Florida, she told me about the conference calls and all along she didn't see how this could work. When she went into volunteer she was sent home within an hour for some inexplicable reason. This is so maddening -- I am beginning to feel the Republican leadership are just plain stupid. In this election with all we knew about the other side (their get out the vote operation, how many field offices they had etc. etc.) how could this be allowed to happen. I am so angry and scared.

Maybe we will find out sometime if the Tea Party members showed up to vote for Romney. There are no doubt some conservatives that didn't vote for Romney because they saw him as not being a true conservative. Thanks for the vote for Obama.

#14 hit one big nail on the head. Bring people in and feed them, the take advantage of the early voting to bus these people to the polls. Then go in with them and show them how to vote for Obama. This is not legal but so what. No one ever said Democrats obeyed election laws.

The Dems have planned elections like this since they promoted the motor voter law. Then you have Democrat voters, some citizens some not. They all get stuff. Cell phones, food stamps (SNAP), rent and utility subsidies. How do you get someone to vote against Obama when they believe he gave them all the stuff.

More than anything, Democrats support their candidates. If Akin and Mourdock were Dems, they would have won regardless. Dems continue to elect the formerly impeached Alcee Hastings in Florida and Jesse Jackson, Jr. in Illinois. Republicans don't support candidates that do dumb things and enable a much worse Democrat candidate to win easily. Makes you wonder who the enemy is.

Easy to blame the candidate when truth is that Marco Rubio did not deliver Florida for the GOP and Ron Paul, Rand Paul's father, did not throw his support to the GOP.

Blame the white GOP who stayed home, also and blame the voters. Rush Limbaugh on the 3,000,000 that stayed home because conservative Hispanics wouldn't vote for a RINO.

I am a bit enamored of the Romney persona but he is gone and so is the dream of an F-word free admin for 4 more years.

Blame what is fixable and useful for the future. Forget or agony except what we put into resolve to do better and get out our own vote.

I made lots of phone calls for our endangered redistricted Congressman here in Maryland for weeks before the election. This was part of the official RNC effort. The phone calls were supposed to identify those who would vote for the Congressman. The system worked because the results of the calls were put in a database right at the campaign office, not in a national one. So they could be retrieved for the GOTV phone calls. I was deeply involved in the Republican campaigns and I never heard of ORCA, but that's probably because the Romney campaign didn't have anything in Maryland, rightly so I suppose.

The whole RNC GOTV campaign was supposed to be so great and I hear Reince Priebus boasting about it several times. What happened here was that people got so many robocalls and live calls that they were furious by the time election day came around. Whether because of that something else our beloved Congressman Roscoe Bartlett lost big in his new district. Governor O'Malley redistricted the state specifically to target Bartlett and it worked.

Re#22: "I no longer have a country. I just live here."

Well, I have a country: The Republic of Texas! Red Staters should gather here and "provide new Guards for their future security".

Let's face it -- the entire operation was a flop. One can't fault Romney who did his best and couldn't have done better except for those "reaching across the aisle" comments, which made me cringe.

It wasn't ordained for us to win. Yet. Eventually, the Democrats will self-destruct or be destroyed by their own policies. Unfortunately, we will all suffer along with them, but at some point, justice will prevail.

Blame the voters who couldn't vote for a member of a "false" religion. Blame the whole big tent who cannot find common ground within the party itself.

Blame the media who supressed the Iran strike on the drone until after the election.

But mostly blame the Chicago way and and the triumph of the Chicago way and Alinsky methods of mind control.

Eating our own in public to get a little press attention is as counter productive to 2016 as vowing to stay home and never vote again as we face a bereft quashed hope, but vow to volunteer and get out our own neighborhoods, precincts, towns, and states vote.

Or we could blame God for not delivering to our prayers and fasting . But it might be better to redouble our efforts in that direction and try to understand why He allowed this direction. What does He want and what does He want us to do? The Bible holds the clue.

IMO we build his Kingdom where charity and love rule and plan for the countdown to Armageddon. But how to wrestle with one's own soul and humanness when hope has turned to hopelessness and anger?

What a bunch of horse-hooey. Given obummer's record in office, Romney shouldn't have even needed a ground game. 3,000,000+ so-called informed, patriotic pubbies stayed home on election day because Mr. Romney didn't give them a personal call or send the limos to take them to their polling places. Shame upon them! Oh yeah, history buffs, suppose this same attitude existed on Lexington Green? Instead of GOTV, there was GOTG(uns).

One way is to build a better coalition from within. And view the fact that the country does NOT want hard right wing running the country. The country is center right.

But not blaming the fiery Tea Party spirit. Keep it but face political reality from within. Look to 2014 and work to get the senate and more GOP governors. Support our congressional leaders who, though human, are our only buffer against obama. And look to the GOP governors to sue the admin for all Constitutional infractions. Maybe the Lord wants cooperation from within the GOP before we can get it from without. Get one Tea Party head that has as much sense and reason as passion and unite us into one force and one source to donate to.

The devastating GOP primary and the class warfare used against our own by Newt and Sarah Palin wanting the primary to go until the convention? Romney couldn't use his election money until the primary was over. Sarah and her Newt in NC, religious idealogy over political smarts?

Unify on values and cooperate like the Alinsky and socialists do and will. And don't tell ourselves that we lost anything but a squeaker. Above all hang with Boehner and McConnell, our last bastion for right now. Regroup. Redouble and moderate our conservatism to find common ground as we render to Ceasar and to God what is theirs. Our souls remain His?

This Romney campaign source is reminiscent of the Mccain cam blaming Sarah Palin adding fuel to the fire the press and dems placed under her stake? GOP are smarter than dems according to PEW. Many voters got themselves out. When the going gets tough...

ORCA did not cost Romney the election. Huge numbers of key 'blocs' did not show up: particualrly evangelicals andliberterians. all out of spite.

Dems did a good job of getting their nutjobs to show up, Repulicans did a poor job of getting their nutjobs to show up.

I don't know about this project, but it resonates with something that happened when voted. It didn't register at the time because I thought we were headed for a GOP blowout: I ran into another lady who had voted for Romney and she mentioned that she had signed up to help, get yard signs, and so on- and then didn't hear back. I said, "Yeah me too actually. Isn't that funny..." Now it does not seem funny at all.

The whole voting concept is fairly simple: Go and vote for the major party candidate who comes closest to representing your own views.

Personally I think the fix was in via Karl Rove for Jeb Bush in 2016. NBL (not bloody likely)

No ground game. The campaign needed to hire a bunch of DRTV, direct marketers and people who can motivate people to buy product. You get people from Telebrands, Eicoff etc. They would have come on board with enough $. ORCA and apps and tweets and Facebook....feh, nice stuff but you have to feed it CONSTANTLY and crescendo it. Nice stuff to play with but no follow up. You begin to think from the stories above it was sabotaged. (Yes, I know that a lot of IT fails...wonder how many fake-qualified Indian programmers they used who are really good at getting stuff to fail.)

I was ready to go in NJ, all I got was fundraising letters. You have to have presence and people everywhere. Pizza, storefronts, house parties, phone calls, car pools all work folks! Also Romney did not roadblock national TV for 1/2 hour, on nets and cable, and get his POV out especially in the last week.

This is the level below Romney that was epic FAIL.

I haven't been part of any political campaign in years, but the basics on election day 'get out the vote' and national coverage haven't changed a jot since I was a student of Dr. Julius Mastro at Drew University. Dr. M is doing 360s in his resting place right now....

I would like to see investigation of two computer-related phenomena. One: the ORCA debacle. From my experience with many homemade apps, the guys who write them consider themselves above it all. If the apps don't work, it's all the fault of the end user. Months later the app guys may decide to touch up a few things. Or not. By then, I've stopped dealing with the company that bought the app. In this case, I'm considering terminating my relationship with the Republican Party. The whole ORCA disaster is emblematic of the way they don't want to listen to the common folk working in the trenches.

Two: the new electronic voting machines. We already know that Democrats stole votes when we had paper ballots. How do we know that they didn't reprogram voting machines in the swing districts? I can't think of another good explanation for how we managed to get 30 Republican governors and retained our large margin in the House, but at the same time lost the Presidency. Why isn't anybody even bringing this up? Bueller? Bueller?

#53, are you for real? Your description is exactly what the Republican Party has been doing for at least two presidential elections...and has been defeated doing it. The old game is a loser every time. We are in a whole new ball game.

#26 You are right on! Even people in Illinois were hopeful that "downstaters" could outvote Crook (Cook/Chicago) County because our current "d" governor was only elected by 3 out of 104 counties in Illinois. I was flabbergasted to hear that more than 3 million voters in the Chicago area voted in this election. The dems have to be given credit for colossal voter fraud in our urban areas. We "downstater" conservatives think our election system doesn't work anymore. I thought the electoral college was established to give the "little guy" a chance for his vote to count. It doesn't and we are done.

The ORCA fiasco is only one of many components in the Romney defeat. His campaign, which often displayhed clever tactics, had faulty overall strategic planning and underlying assumptions about the electorate that were out to lunch.

The Romney campaign, that is, its directors and cheerleaders, operated from the eternal deadly assumption cherished by GOP Moderates: that is, they can win big by jettisoning and discouraging the Right, especially the Tea Party-Sarah Palin wing, and building a coaltion with Indpedents and Moderate Democrats. Worked well, guys, didn't it? So, if you're wondering where those missing 3 million GOP votes are, the answer is, they got your message and declined to crash your genteel little party.

I did vote for Romney/Ryan on Tuesday, but declined to get involved in the campaign, since I doubted it would appreciate working

Re: #62 -- Please delete last para. Attempt to delete posted it. Weird.

Confucius say, "in an important election, never name a software app, 'Orca'. Killer whales, after all, are known to turn on their trainers. Just ask Sea World". Name it Phoenix, Eclipse or Genesis instead.

The electoral college needs to be modified or dropped. It has this all-or-nothing approach for the commitment of each
state. Who is to say how many each state's electoral count will be? Is it fair to have about seven or so states that directly determine who we get stuck with?

Although probably not the founding father's original intention, these states have become the pendulum, the axis of who wins. It needs to be modified. By manipulating these key states, the socialists have found the needle in the haystack, so to speak, that makes the whole stack tumble their way, in the end.

Electoral college forces us into this representative/group situation, where the individual votes, do not actually count towards the end goal, of a win by popular vote. It becomes subjective, not objective.

The existence of the electoral college, makes it way easier for the socialists to cheat. All they have to do is figure out which states need "fixing", implement their scheme, and get/score that state every time. No approach to satisfy each individual voter, need be of concern. Geographics? Ha! - take a hike: forget the midwest and the south! Just focus on the Great Lakes, Fl & Va states. If electoral college continues, knock each states electoral count to no more than ten a piece-no more 18-20 electoral counts for some states!

Eric Boling said, "Obama won by 24% of electoral vote, only 2.4% or popular vote". Gooo figure! A mandate? Hardly.

#54.... Awesome!

#9, Mark Levin used to blast Romney, so why should he or anyone from his group even RSVP?
If all of the above bloggers got this treatment and no follow up from the Romney campaign than the Romney people have no one but themselves to blame!
I got tons of calls from Ann Romney, Ryan, and other Republicans, Tom Ridge, Giuliani etc.
This was 'low hanging fruit' as Mark Levin used to say, and it is dreadful that some technical glitches caused this to go that despised undocumented vegetable in the WH!

Almost suppressed our vote with his 'reach across the aisle' statement. We did vote, I think that comment is what did him in.

I love LaFonda, as much as I love technology. But I still love technology.

Make yerself a dang quesadilla, Napoleon.

All together now: I love LaFonda......

I would like to see this debacle better investigated internally. This sort of system depends of centralized servers. There could be single points of failure run by Obama moles not passing on these millions of messages where they should go. This is why it is so risky to use computers as voting machines. You need a techie as a poll watcher!

#54 A liberal friend told me shortly after the primary that Evangelicals would NEVER vote for a Mormon and in the end Obama would win. I didn't believe it then but I believe it now.

It's the party of stupid. As #7 points out, they shunted the Tea Partiers aside - to their peril. They had the issues, the money, the boots available to be deployed on the ground, - even a "decent and honorable" candidate to oppose the worst pResident ever - to win this thing. What they didn't have was the intelligence to properly use them.

That's why we need a new party. We can't fire these idiots - we've tried. So just walk away.

Oh, and I stupidly sat around all day checking off voters because the problem with my Orca app would be fixed any minute . Stupid me.

MOST of the states Hussein won had NO Voter ID Laws in effect.

Even in IRAQI Elections, they used Voter's thumbprints to guard against fraud.

Reply #4 is right. The 2-word-name-that-starts-with-cluster is the only way to explain it. Grief and pain in biblical porportions is the other explanation.

A little off subject, but has anybody noticed that solid blue NY and NJ get hit by a couple of storms, and TV is full of whining, unprepared, weeping, helpless "victims" who are totally unable to take care of themselves? Had a weeks notice and still had stored no water and other provisions, and can do nothing but wail that government is not doing enough to help them? Pathetic.

I don't know why the republicans lost the election, but I DO know how to find out. Politics follow the dynamics of a Complex Adaptive System. The agents (us) and the system co-evolve and change based upon factors that are unknowable beforehand, but recognizable short term. The key is to use the proper tools of Complexity to unearth those factors as they occur and respond to them rapidly. The factors in 2016 will most likely be different than they are now. It is unfortunate to look at Orca as the reason, and plan the next war based upon the last one. The Republican response is to have "experts" form a hypothesis. This will lead to failure. They need to use the data itself to formulate the hypothesis, without the inherent bias of the "experts". The "experts" sure had it right this time, didn't they! Yet the Republicans will turn to them again. Isn't there someone in the Republican Party with an ounce of sense?

If the Tea Party or conservatives needed to be begged to vote for Romney after the past four years , then they deserve what's coming.
This election validates that we have become a majority nation of selfish morons.
Orca or not.

I worked the Legal Hotline/War Room in NC. 50% of our calls were re: Orca not working and/or no credentials to get them into the polling places. 40% of the other calls were poll workers (non-Orca) whose names were not submitted by the county Repub. party to the County Board of Elections as observers. Simple steps not taken led to this disaster. Furthermore, the absurd levels to which this campaign took secrecy was idiotic. I was not given any written material until 60 am Tues re: protocol responses to issues raised in calls to a LEGAL HOTLINE. And, we had numbered copies of protocols which had to be signed in and out. Over-paranoid and over-thought. I've worked elections for 12 years-by far the most chaotic for the most stupid of reasons. All unnecessary, unforced errors.

Romney has been a very very successful man in his past. Clearly, this was a failure. And it was a very poor time to fail.

Drive a stake in the heart of every one of the Washington DC based political consultants who have run these lame campaigns. The party of Main street simply can no longer be run from K street.

Ocra was a disaster but the damage was done over the summer when Obama painted Romney as an out of touch plutocrat an there was no reply. It didn't work with the evangelicals because they are actually better informed and cared intensely about issues like abortion and religious freedom so they voted. It worked with those members of the white working class who were more secular. They stayed home rather than vote for the rich guy who closes businesses.

Hope and Change morphed in Divide an Conquer.

I had a slightly different problem with the Romney campaign IT apparatus than that described here about Orca. I made three separate attempts to donate on different occasions and one attempt to buy a T-shirt from the official Romney site and each time could never complete my transaction. The error that came up repeatedly was that I had not included my email address when it was very plainly included. I contacted the Romney campaign and even included a screen shot to show them what was going on.

I doubt the Romney people were inept at getting something like a web site to run properly but I do not doubt that their sites could have been hacked.

Let's face it:

-Obama had/has endless Google & Facebook resources at his disposal. These are data collection and mining gurus. Not only can this be used for offense (GOTV) but the same data can be used for defense (understanding your enemy and his tendencies and using them against them).
-Romney had ORCA and apparently a bunch of volunteers slapping an app together in someone's basement.

How hard would it have been for team Obama to infiltrate team Romney, get an ORCA admin account, slip in a virus at the right time, and totally crash the party on election day? Does anyone really think they WOULDN'T do that??

i belong to a tea party. we were in touch with other tea parties and right wing groups across the country against obama. we turned out and voted for romney. what happened to our votes?

Just another play on republican strategy. PULL DEFEAT out of the jars of victory. Unless the republican party gets rid of those rejects to the human racred out of party control, zero and the democRATS will joyously lead our Nation to destruction.

Oh come on, be serious...we did not lose because TEA parties were "ignored" by anyone. Give me a break. Any TEA Party folks out there voted (they wouldn't stay home because they were butthurt for not being catered to). I do agree that they R&R group should have utilized GOTV still. At any rate, if you know anything about project management or even the rolling out of a new software, then you know that a lot of planning, preparing and testing should take place before going live. I don't know how much of what happened was poor management, but so much went wrong that it sounds very much like there was sabotage and that it was likely an inside job. I truly believe there were moles in the Romney campaign team.

Once again defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Seems to be a pattern of behavior for the GOP wizards of smart.

What Number 7 said, plus the conservatives and a speech by Sarah at the convention would have helped. Look, I knew from looking at Romney in the primaries he was a dim bulb that America wouldn't go for but RNC elites get what they want and now get what they deserve. 2012 will not be forgotten by this life time conservative.

13 hours of my life I will never get back.

I don't buy the lack of enthusiasm. I received more calls & mailings this year than all the previous years combined. Thousands were turned away from Romney's events, bigger venues were re-scheduled, people were excited. My only complaint Romney should included Palin, DeMint, Colburn, West, Franklin Graham, catholics & all faiths... and yes Ron Paul. His advisers should have been more inclusive. Regardless Romney would have made a great president & I am very sad for our country.

I am Tea Party, and I did not vote for Romney. I voted for Gary Johnson. I watched Romney's team stiff-arm Sarah Palin and Ron Paul at the national convention, and I saw them changing rules and refusing to seat delegates. Why would I vote for the man at the top of that?

I'd like to add a vote for secession. Perhaps Texas has the intestinal fortitude to do that. I believe their constitution allows for it, and I'd gladly move there -- if the new Texas nation continues to allow gay people in.

Nov 6, once again the bad guys beat the dumb guys. This Orca snafu and less turnout than McCain got... This is how you lose a country, folks, even a great country.

All those millions who stayed home, dissatisfied with an imperfect, uninspiring Romney, nevertheless in a very real way cast their ballot for Obama. Thanks for nuthin´. Hope your wonderful inspiring candidate comes along some day. In the meantime, enjoy four more years of the Obama regime disaster.
Idiots.

#91 (cont.)
The first time I saw that Eric ´´etch-a-sketch´´ Fehrnstrom speak on the news months ago, I thought...
Oops, Boston, we have a problem. Romney´s not fielding top flight people.

Risk the presidency on a new program. Wow!