Orca was no fail whale, says Romney’s digital director
Conservative bloggers have arrived at the “anger” stage of grieving, going so far as to accuse contract developers of sabotaging the Mitt Romney campaign’s “get out the vote” efforts. But Romney campaign Digital Director Zac Moffatt told Ars that Project Orca was relatively successful—and that it was not a determining factor in Romney’s election-night loss.
Project Orca was a Web-based app developed to help the Romney campaign track which supporters had voted and to help poll watchers report any potential voter suppression, fraud, or other irregularities back to the campaign for follow-up by its legal team. Volunteers at polls across the country were to access Orca from their smartphones and feed all data back to the main Romney campaign site inside the Boston Garden. But, as we reported, Orca caused widespread frustration after user credentials were issued improperly. At one point during election day, Comcast cut off inbound traffic to Orca’s servers because it was mistaken for a denial of service attack. And even while the system was working, the high volume of data being sent to the server caused such slow response that it appeared to some users that the system had crashed.
Of course that’s what they’d say. But we know better.
Listen all y’all, this is sabotage?
“For whatever reasons, the conservative bloggers have latched onto Orca as the reason it all fell apart,” Moffatt added. Those bloggers have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted as a fifth column within the Romney camp. Targeted Victory was singled out by some bloggers because a few of its developers worked for Al Gore in the past.
“Why do they have Al Gore’s dev working on Romney’s social media development?!” blogger Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick asked. “Truly, how can they expect dedication?” She also singled out another developer who is African-American and “who has a 96 percent chance of being an Obama voter… I will be accused of ‘racism’ for even flagging. But it’s the truth.”