ORCA (computer system)
ORCA was a mobile-optimized web application used as a component of the "get out the vote" (GOTV) efforts for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
Frustrated volunteers reported being unable to access ORCA and criticised a lack of prior briefing, misleading instructions and patchy on-the-day support.
The system's failings have been attributed by technology writers to a combination of factors including not doing prior quality assurance or beta testing, inadequate documentation and poor design.
In the 2008 US presidential election, the Obama campaign utilized a system called Houdini to enable volunteers to report voting data to a national hotline.
[3] She described the system's key function as not being to predict the outcome, but to identify low turnouts in target precincts so that the campaign could take action by contacting missing voters and urging them to go to the polls.
"[1] According to the campaign, ORCA would identify how between 18 and 23 million people had voted on election day, providing "the most accurate ballot projections ever" and ensuring "hyper-accuracy of our supporter targeting as we work to turn them out to the polls.
"[5] In a pre-election video, Romney told volunteers: "As part of this task force, you'll be the key link in providing critical, real-time information to me and to the staff so that we can ensure that every last supporter makes it to the polls.
[1] The data they gathered would be monitored by 800 volunteers at campaign headquarters on the floor of TD Garden in Boston via a Web-based application; it would be used to coordinate contacts throughout election day to pro-Romney voters who had not shown up at the polls.
[7] As volunteers tried to log in, the surge of traffic caused the system to collapse altogether for about an hour and a half, leading to scenes of panic among Romney staffers at the TD Garden.
"[5] John Ekdahl Jr., a Romney volunteer and web developer in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote a widely discussed account of his experiences with ORCA.
"[8] Ekdahl described the effect of ORCA as being that "30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help, like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc.
[5] A Romney campaign official told ABC News, which predicted on the eve of the election that Obama would win by a 50%–47% margin,[10] "Your numbers don't matter to us.
[5] Another Romney aide told National Review's Katrina Trinko that in fact ORCA's problems had "no relation to the outcome.
"[12] Conservative writer Joel B. Pollak suggested that ORCA had ended up suppressing Romney's own vote by tying up campaign volunteers at a critical time.
[13] Ekdahl saw a "bitter irony" in the fact 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).
While political scientists doubted that its failure had made much of a difference to the outcome, they suggested that if it had worked properly it could have resulted in a closer election.
Lara Brown of Villanova University said that it was likely that ORCA had "had a substantial effect" on the turnout, particularly in rural counties of Ohio where Romney had underperformed.
"[5] Robert X. Cringely, writing in InfoWorld, concluded that "everything in the Orca rollout went great, except for a failure to do any quality assurance, proof its documentation, or beta test in the seven months from conception to implementation.
Whoever was behind Orca apparently also failed to hire a competent Web designer, anticipate server loads, beef up its bandwidth, or notify its ISP to expect a bump in traffic.
"[15] Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica commented that the key failure was the dependency on automated testing rigs, which "can't show what the system's performance will look like to the end user.
"[3] Slate writer Sasha Issenberg argued that the problems ran far deeper than ORCA's technical failings, as the Romney campaign had been left behind by the cutting edge of data science.
He noted that while a system like ORCA could not have changed the demographics, data science did make a great difference to the ability of the two campaigns to target and mobilize their voters.
He suggested that ORCA's ability to affect the outcome had been over-hyped by the Romney campaign, as there was only so much that could be done on election day itself: "On short notice, you can send robocalls, reorder a call list and employ paid phone banks, but you are not radically changing the shape of the electorate.
