Unleashed! Project Orca, the campaign killer whale

First, let me assure my faithful readers that Notes From the Field is not evolving from a tech snark blog into a political snark blog. Really, I try to avoid writing about politics because it gives my editor agita whenever I do it, and I need somebody to sign those checks every month to keep me and Apache in dog food.

Bear with me, however, for my second politically tinged post of the week. Two days ago I talked about how big data helped President Obama win re-election. Now I’m going to talk about how big data — or really, a complete and utter failure to utilize it effectively — was instrumental in Governor Romney’s downfall. It’s a textbook lesson in how not to develop and launch a new product.

[ Cringely covers the other side of the coin in “The winner of this year’s presidential election: Big data.” And don’t worry, folks, the tech trash talk will return next week. | For a humorous take on the tech industry’s shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld’s Tech Watch blog. ]

Coming into this election cycle, the Romney camp had a plan. It was going to rally the troops and beat the Obamanistas at what they do best: the political ground game. Its secret weapon was a smartphone app called Project Orca (I have no idea if that’s an acronym or what it stands for). Technically, Orca was not a mobile app but a mobile website, which Romney poll watchers were supposed to use to keep track of every person who voted, then other volunteers could round up the stragglers and get them out to the polls.

John Ekdahl Jr., a Web designer and Romney supporter in Florida, wrote a devastating blog post about how badly the Orca program was bungled by the Romneyans. Everything that could go wrong with a new software rollout did go wrong. The only word to describe what happened on Election Day starts with a “c,” ends with a “k,” and has “luster” (along with a few other letters) in the middle.

Ekdahl says he received a 60-page PDF file containing instructions for how to use Orca and the names of every voter in his precinct at 10 p.m. the night before the polls opened. He was expected to print out all 60 pages and take them to the polls when they opened at 6:30 the next morning.

The first problem: Before poll watchers were allowed to enter the polls, they were required to obtain a poll watcher certificate from a local “victory center” (Romney headquarters). This small but essential fact somehow got left out of the PDF file. However, the advice to bring a chair to sit on was listed twice.

Ekdahl was turned away at the door. So he spent six hours on Election Day calling every “victory center” he could find, as well as the legal and info hotlines set up for Orca, without reaching a human.

Ekdahl went home and got online searching for answers. There he encountered other volunteers in a similar (but not swift) boat. They too lacked the proper poll-watching credentials.

Some had spent hours searching the Android and iTunes markets unsuccessfully for the Orca app, which, of course, wasn’t really an app. Many tried and failed to log on to the Orca website, which didn’t go live until 6 a.m. on Election Day. Romney’s dev team had set up the site on a secure HTTPS connection, but failed to turn on forwarding from HTTP. Thousands of Romney volunteers dialed up the site using HTTP or WWW, got a 404 error, and assumed it was down. Later that day, the site did go down, crushed under so much traffic that the ISP decided it must be under a DDoS attack and shut it off, according to Ekdahl.

To summarize: 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.

(Orca appeared to be outsourced to an entity called The CheckMate Company — at least, that was the website used to host Orca — but I can’t find out anything at all about them. The DNS registration is anonymous, the website is now offline, and Google turns up nothing about them. Anybody heard of these guys?)

Ekdahl concludes:

The end result was 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. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.

Ekdahl’s blog post did not go unnoticed across the political blogosphere, and the problems weren’t limited to Florida. Breitbart.com’s Joel Pollak talked with a Colorado volunteer who confirmed Ekdahl’s account:

I worked on the Colorado team, and we were called by hundreds (or more) volunteers who couldn’t use the app or the backup phone system. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn’t work, and we couldn’t change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later.

Breitbart’s conclusion: The Romney campaign suppressed its own voters. The conservative Human Events blog declared “Project Orca dies on the beach.” But my favorite headline is Politico’s: “Romney’s fail whale.” Wish I’d thought of that one.

Bottom line: Having big data isn’t enough. You need to know how to use it, too. As the Romney campaign learned, it’s a lot trickier than it looks.

Have you ever had an IT project fail this badly? And what does “Orca” stand for anyway? Submit your own acronyms below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Unleashed! Project Orca, the campaign killer whale,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.