The Whale Formerly known as ORCA.

Professor Leek had mentioned earlier in the semester that she had a prediction regarding media coverage following the election. She thought in the moments after the conclusion, there would be an unveiling of a scandal that happened in the last moments of the election that would have a significant impact on the outcome, or that would be covered up by one of the campaigns. I kept my eye out for such a happening and was excited when i was able to experience the phenomena for myself in Mitt Romney's failed Project ORCA. 

The system was set up as a mobile app that was to drive voters to the polls on the election day, ultimately giving Romney a significant head start against Obama, and was said to be Mitt Romney's secret plan of sorts for winning he election. The problem: it was a complete and utter failure. The system crashed at multiple points on election day and voters were getting extremely frustrated with lag time, system malfunctions, and inconsistencies."It was a perfect storm of technical issues and confusing training programs," according to Stephanie Marcus, a writer for The Huffington Post. All of the problems made ORCA unhelpful to the campaign and ultimately led the way for the first steps to a election failure. 

In the article i reviewed titled, "Mitt Romney's Project Orca Failure: Broken ORCA App Cost Him Thousands of Votes," Stephanie Marcus writes about how Mitt Romney's campaign made claims after the election that the project wasn't intended to be a complete saving grace for the former governor in the election; however in other articles it was speculated that the project was supposed to be Romney's plan for campaign success. With so much at stake placed on a new system, you would think that the campaign team would have better tested the app, as such a system could have potentially been incredibly helpful for voters, especially young voters who are fluent in the app world.

I find issues not necessarily with the article, but with the campaign statements after the election. If the app wasn't intended to have a major impact on the outcome of the election (according to the article), then why use it at all? I think this app was intended for just that, and the Romney campaign put far too much in the hands of ORCA, which ultimately lead them down the path of failure. I don't think that it was the complete reason why they lost, but for young voters especially, something like this on the side of the Romney campaign could  have been incredibly helpful, since he wasn't the most popular guy with those voters. In my opinion, Romney really missed a step with this one. He could have really had something golden in his hands, and with all that money, he really had as many resources as he could have ever wanted. If it were me i would have thoroughly tested the app, instead of relying on hope the day of the election, especially since Hope had clearly been on Obama's side in the past.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/mitt-romney-project-orca-broken-app-cost-thousands-votes_n_2109986.html