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An inside look behind Romney's loss: An epic failure of its Orca big-data app

142 points by CrankyBear 14y ago

jeremiep 14y ago
This is pretty usual when government and software development are mixed together. All of the bad developers I met at college are now working for the government or are contracted by the government. Most hackers I know wouldn't go anywhere close to such a contract. My guess as to why it happens this way is that they check your scores rather than your actual skills and anyone without a diploma is automatically disqualified. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture.
- brudgers 14y ago
  The government wasn't involved at all. The Republican Party (like the Democratic Party) is just a large dumb organization.
- mbetter 14y ago
  Since when is Mitt Romney's campaign part of the government? And even if we give you that leap, Obama's campaign was fantastic on this particular front.
- rprasad 14y ago
  * All of the bad developers I met at college are now working for the government or are contracted by the government. * Interestingly, all of the government developers I know would run circles around almost any startup programmer. These guys design and implement systems that are designed to last decades without even minor bugs. Frequently, they manage to keep systems designed decades ago from collapsing under their own weight. My guess as to why it happens this way is that they check your scores rather than your actual skills and anyone without a diploma is automatically disqualified. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture. Government hiring is credentials and experience based. Don't be bitter that you can't get a job because you lack the credentials or experience to make the cut. Most hackers I know wouldn't go anywhere close to such a contract. A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone. When you are designing and implementing critical systems, being a professional matters. Most hackers simply don't have the self-discipline to get such a contract.
  - qq66 14y ago
    "A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone." Let's see... you can wear shorts, work from home, and move fast and break things, or you can wear a tie to go to an office park and build DMV software. I'm not surprised that the people with a lot of options choose the startups.
    - rprasad 14y ago
      Well, I suppose the difference between the two is that in the former, you do nothing of relevance for a product that doesn't matter (which is why it can break repeatedly without incident). In the latter, you are building a program/system that people are actually using to do things. DMV software may not be sexy, but it is infinitely more valuable than yet another Instragram clone.
  - pnathan 14y ago
    > A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone. When you are designing and implementing critical systems, being a professional matters. Most hackers simply don't have the self-discipline to get such a contract. Disagree. I work in critical system infrastructure. Dressing up nice to talk the computer doesn't make the code better; aggressively making the code better does. It's my opinion that the better dressed the guy writing code, the more suspect his code is...
    - michaelt 14y ago
      It's my opinion that the better dressed the guy writing code, the more suspect his code is... So do you think others make judgements about your ability to do a job based on how you're dressed?
      - pnathan 14y ago
        Everyone is making judgements, are you wearing black, are you wearing a suit, are you wearing fashionable clothing, etc. My opinion/observation is that the more attention that is paid to your clothing, the more your engineering/code quality suffers. It like the IQ test: wearing suits impresses people who think highly of people wearing suits. Maybe it's better to impress people who think highly of quality work. edit: It's foolishness to dress finely to make people think you're awesome. You're not more of a professional because you wear a tie and suit. You're just a guy in funny-looking clothing who looks like important people. If you want to be professional, do the job well, do it kindly, do it so it can be used for its intended purpose for a long time, do it with respect for other people. Dressing nice has so very little to do with professionalism.
- roguecoder 14y ago
  It wasn't a problem the Obama campaign had. Nor that the current government websites had. This was a failure of management by someone who, it appears, was good at exploiting tax loopholes rather than being good at managing people doing something productive. I would argue that this is the result of mixing business people into software development. MBAs focus on ultimate results instead of iterative improvement, believe in secrecy over learning and generally don't understand the human factor of software development, much less the infrastructure involved in running it once it's written. After all, programmers are cost centers to be outsourced as quickly as possible. The only person who admits to being a technical manager for Romney on LinkedIn is an old-school web developer, not a government worker. He's been a consultant for a decade and a half. His company's website uses Flash, loads six different totally unminimized js files and displays gradient images for the background. He is exactly the person I would expect a somewhat-older business dude to hire, if that business dude knew nothing about web development and was uncomfortable with excessively-technical things. His resume looks impressive, he's older than nearly everyone else with web experience, he can probably speak CEO-jargon-ese and he isn't going to make them feel dumb.
nlh 14y ago
Stripping out the politics here, some good lessons for all of us: 1. Test your damn product before it goes live. 2. User feedback, user feedback, user feedback. Things like the confusion of the use of "app" (vs "website") and the lack of http->https routing scream of things that a developer would think are "obvious" but even the most basic user testing would reveal early on. 3. Stealth mode can be trouble. This may be a controversial opinion but I've learned to believe more and more that "Surprise! We're here!" approach does more harm than good. There are limited circumstances where this is not the case (situations where knowing the existence of a project can damage that project) but I emphasize limited.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Yes! Long experience has taught me that I can either look dumb in front of a small, friendly audience of early testers or a big audience of people with inflated launch-day expectations. Not looking dumb is not an option. It is a big fucking world, and it will never fit inside the 3 pounds of meat that people somehow expect me to think with. Especially when some of that meat is dedicated to things like the ego and false pride that tell me that my big launch will be magically perfect because I am so smart.
  - lukasb 14y ago
    "Not looking dumb is not an option." I'm going to be quoting you forever, thanks.
jd 14y ago
Are we really to believe this is plausible? 1: Romney's big data app failed on election day which led to ineffective use of their volunteers. 2: Romney's campaign performed exactly as predicted by the likes of Nate Silver. Therefore: the failure of their big-data app was inconsequential. Otherwise we have to assume that the hundreds of polls were consistently biased in the direction of Obama and that the failure of the Orca big data app exactly compensates for this failure of the polls so that the outcome of the election is nonetheless exactly as predicted! Absolutely 100% ridiculous.
- bcoates 14y ago
  Nate Silver predicted a range of outcomes including closer losses and victories for Romney. Republican "Get Out The Vote" outperforming history was probably a necessary condition of that 10% shot at winning. Instead it looks like the Romney campaign dropped the ball on it. No conspiracy theory needed.
  - sinnerswing 14y ago
    An inside look behind Romney's loss: Bill Clinton
  - ajross 14y ago
    Well, it's probably better to say that the 10% included all known error estimations. Given the skew between final polls and actual results seen over history, Silver's model figured it was 1 in 10 that some "unknown" factor would pollute the numbers enough to produce a Romney victory. In this he was actually much more conservative than Sam Wang, who AFAICT looked only at the poll sampling error and arrived at a muc higher (e.g. 99%) chance of victory. And actually, I think you can make the case that Silver was too conservative. Looking at the results, the poll averages were well within sampling error in all battleground states. And sorting the states by margin, Romney would have had to pick up FL, OH, VA and CO to win. Obama won Colorado by 4.7% (not too far from the predicted ~3.5%, I believe), which is comparatively huge and absolutely not explainable by polling error (a Romney victory there looks like about three sigma to me). In hindsight, the known state of the election on Tuesday morning was never winnable for Romney. Wang was right (even though his averages came down on the wrong side in FL), Silver was too timid.
ck2 14y ago
Why does everyone blame/praise the data? It's the voters that made the difference. We are talking 1% of people changed by campaigning, everyone has already made up their minds. They spend a billion dollars on this nonsense and probably a million "man hours" annoying people door to door. Just imagine what kind of actual good that much money and effort could have done for schools, etc. The population is just becoming more progressive and "values" from the 1950s are less and less popular.
- tedh 14y ago
  I'm a progressive but I don't know if I'm convinced that the populate is moving to the left. I hope so but.... Romney's loss may just be that he just wasn't a candidate that excited the right-wing enough for them to really get out and vote. Romney wasn't conservative enough for them and he made a number of bone-headed blunders along the campaign trail. That said, I hope you're right and I'm wrong : )
  - ck2 14y ago
    The right would have voted for a lump of coal vs Obama after foaming at the mouth for the past four years at Obama. Romney is kind of proof of that since he was the pick of the primaries. It's not a get out the vote problem, it's just that the old population is slowly dying off and they can only brainwash their young to a certain level when information flows so freely today. I am disappointed there is only a 2.5% difference in the popular vote when Bush was only 4 years ago but people have tiny memories and change happens slowly. Values like anti-gay, anti-birthcontrol, etc. etc. etc. aren't going to fly with most voters under 25 unless they are raised in a very conservative environment and are never exposed to the rest of the world outside their home.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      the old population is slowly dying off As if the young population won't age and replace them? Believe me, age, responsibility, and having kids changes your outlook. When I was 25 and didn't know anything, I was pretty liberal too. I voted for Jesse Jackson once. And I supported Romney this year, even though he wasn't conservative enough for me, he was better than the alternative.
adolph 14y ago
It is pretty interesting that they didn't have the system up and running well before early voting started--do campaigns not do get out the vote volunteer work during early voting?
- spamizbad 14y ago
  My hunch is that this project was started way too late. At the start of the Republican primary in 2011, Romney's fundraising wasn't aggressive, and it's unlikely his team prioritized a "Big Data" initiative from day 1. In the ensuing primary slugfest, Romney probably needed to put a ton of resources into advertising to win. He also had a very large campaign payroll: his people were well compensated, but that didn't leave a lot money left-over for things like Orca. Based on this conjecture, Orca probably got started sometime in the Spring, essentially giving the campaign 5-7 months to ship a bullet-proof GotV app.... alongside all the other stuff the team had to build (Tons of miscellaneous internal tools, the public mobile apps, etc). A lack of time and resources probably doomed it. Moral of the story? Software is hard. Don't take it lightly.
  - btilly 14y ago
    Lack of resources was probably not a problem. The amount of soft money around was tremendous. But too much resources leads to the temptation to throw lots of bodies at it. Lots and lots of bodies is simply not a good way to hit an aggressive schedule.
    - ZachPruckowski 14y ago
      But most of that money couldn't be put towards a program like ORCA. The one saving grace of Citizen's United is the limitation on PAC-campaign coordination.
      - microtherion 14y ago
        Romney could have lent the money to his own campaign, couldn’t he?
woodchuck64 14y ago
"Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election." I hope this puts the last nail in the coffin holding the remains of the hope that Romney would have been a better business and technical strategist for America than Obama.
- viscanti 14y ago
  Because no good business/technical strategist has ever overseen a complex software project that had a bug in it?
  - s_henry_paulson 14y ago
    The article doesn't really describe a "bug" so much as a complete lack of planning, ignoring warning signs, brushing off questions and constructive criticisms, and in general demonstrates the exact wrong way to implement any system. No, no good strategist would ever release a "big data" system without stress testing it. You'd be hard pressed to find a job doing stuff like that.
  - roguecoder 14y ago
    That was an unmitigated disaster, possibly contributing to the total destruction of their employer? Well, I don't label people based on single data points; they might be very nice people and perfectly competent. But I certainly wouldn't hire them after this.
- marze 14y ago
  The presidential election is a game, quite complicated, and the winner gets to be president. Voters and voting is just one aspect of the game. Romney lost this match, probably partly due to an IT and analysis advantage the Obama team had.
- deleted 14y ago
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- ams6110 14y ago
  Romney himself has a considerable track record of success in the private sector. Hard to think he would know less about what works than Obama, who has never worked there.
programminggeek 14y ago
I'm skeptical of blaming the tools so much as the people responsible for buying them, building them, etc. Also, no amount of data driven malarky changed the fact that a lot of people weren't so excited about Romney or so upset about Obama that they changed the current status quo. President, house, and senate remain largely the same, so really, people weren't convinced that a dramatically different direction was needed. At the end of the day, Romney lost because he didn't convince enough people to change. Some of that is money, some is tech, some is just he didn't do a good enough job leading his campaign to victory.
- wpietri 14y ago
  I agree about blaming the tools, but I think that last bit is false inference. An awful lot of people were convinced that a dramatically different direction was needed. It's just that we have roughly similar numbers of those people.
Tsts 14y ago
Romney never played the game to win, but to show there are even worse alternatives than the black Bush.
- jfc 14y ago
  What a vulgar sentiment! President Obama is hardly a black Bush, whatever your thoughts about his policies. If you really believe they are the same--yet utterly fail to articulate your rationale--there probably isn't much reason to engage in a discussion with you.
- pradocchia 14y ago
  Disagree w/ your specifics, strongly agree w/ the perception of a narrative being present. Agree that Romney was never in real danger of winning, disagree that he himself threw the contest. He wanted to win, it just wasn't in the cards.
GabrielF00 14y ago
FWIW the same thing happened to Obama in 2008, at least in the key swing state of Virginia. I did some campaigning there for Obama the weekend before the election and the system that managed their get-out-the-vote efforts had crashed statewide. The precinct captains were handing volunteers old printouts of where to knock on doors and then using a highlighter to mark your route on a Google Maps printout. Given the limitations it was still an effective system for organizing a lot of volunteers.
- tedsuo 14y ago
  Yeah, strike lists are The Way It Has Been Done for over a century, it works pretty well. What amazes me about this story is not that the software crashed, but that they did not have precinct captains and strike lists at the ready to step in. And that they were only rolling out their GOTV operation on the day of the election, and not sooner? Pretty bizarre.
deleted 14y ago
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jfc 14y ago
I don't believe the app is the reason for the loss. It does, however, point to a glaring weakness of the campaign: organization.
patrickgzill 14y ago
The RNC establishment absolutely HATES Ron Paul's guts. Given the slap in the face to all the RP volunteers, a large percentage of them voted for the Libertarian candidate in protest, voted for Obama as a protest, or did not even vote. If you look at Ohio, Florida, and Virginia (I am going from memory here) - the votes gotten by the libertarian candidate represented a large portion of votes needed to swing the state to Romney. And those 3 states' EC votes would have put Romney a lot closer, giving him 266 EC votes. Add in Colorado (numbers below) and he would have won. Florida: 29EC votes; difference was 61,000 votes, L. got 44,000 votes Ohio: 18E votes: difference was 104,000 votes, L got 47,000 Virginia: 13EC votes: difference was 116,000, L and Constitution parties got 44,000 . Colorado: 9EC votes: difference was 113,000, L and Constitution got 37,000 . Clausewitz, in his treatise "On War" dedicates an entire chapter to "Moral Forces" , what we would term "an organization's morale" . Did crappy software contribute? Perhaps. But wars and elections are not won by software, but by people. That critical Libertarian slice or whatever you want to call it, of the traditional Republican base, was demoralized over Ron Paul and that resulted in an Obama victory. Description of rule changes at RNC convention: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/28/news/la-pn-ron-paul-supporters-walk-out-of-gop-convention-20120828 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/28/news/la-pn-ron-paul-...
- dripton 14y ago
  Regardless, there's no way all of those Libertarian voters would have voted Republican. Some who voted Libertarian did so out of concern for civil liberties or drug legalization or avoiding war, and many of those would be more likely to vote Democratic than Republican if the option of voting Libertarian were not present. You can't just put voters on a left-right axis.
- qq66 14y ago
  So even making the incorrect assumption that 100% of the Gary Johnson votes were coming from would-be Republicans, none of the outcomes would have changed.
  - patrickgzill 14y ago
    That is not what I said... key sentence is "That critical Libertarian slice or whatever you want to call it, of the traditional Republican base, was demoralized over Ron Paul and that resulted in an Obama victory." Meaning the libertarian section of the Republican base, not meaning the people who necessarily voted for Gary Johnson.
danso 14y ago
The OP borders on blogspam, read the more detailed account where it was original posted: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php Among the more amusing errors: A checklist for poll-watchers left out a vital item -- "poll watcher certificate" -- in a packet that went out to tens of thousands of volunteers. This should also be amusing to most web devs: > Next, and this part I find mind-boggingly absurd, the web address was located at "https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca. Notice the "s" after http. This denotes it's a secure connection, something that's used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn't auto-forward the regular "http" to "https" and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down.
- deleted 14y ago
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gojomo 14y ago
There are more 1st-person details at the Breitbart account: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-the-Romney-Campaign-Suppressed-Its-Own-Vote http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-... I find this volunteer account notable: I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red. Putting aside Hanlon's Razor ("never ascribe to malics what can be explained by incompetence") for a moment: what if some of these failures were due to partisan/hacker tampering? If you owned the server(s), you could scramble a state's PINs. You could break redirects. You could bias the projections for overconfidence, or mark records as 'voted' or 'followed-up' that hadn't been. With a little phone-hacking, you could make sure attempts to call-in with problems get no answers. A single skilled amoral hacker could more easily suppress thousands of actual votes this way, compared to voting-machine/voting-tabulation tampering. And the details could disappear more easily into the secrecy and cover-your-ass bullshitting that is common in a partisan, temporary campaign organization.
evandena 14y ago
That wasn't much of a look inside.
flxmglrb 14y ago
Romney lost because he was a terrible candidate, simple as that. Even the Republican base hated him. Right now the GOP leadership is busy flailing around trying to figure out why they didn't win. The ones who have gotten closest to the truth are the ones who have zeroed in on this year's lower-than-normal turnout of traditionally Republican voters (as this article touches upon). However, the underlying reason for that wasn't a failure of software or a lack of last-minute "get out the vote" campaigning, it's because people just plain didn't like Romney. Remember the primaries? For months the Republican primaries were a game of "anybody but Romney". The primary voters at times even gave consideration to total crackpots like Santorum and Cain. Think about it -- they sent the message that they'd rather have some unelectable whackjob like Rick Santorum than be stuck with Romney. That's how much they didn't like him. But when it was all said and done, the Republicans finally gritted their teeth and accepted Romney as the nominee, despite the fact that they really, really didn't like the idea. Then on election day, many Republicans simply stayed home rather than hold their nose and vote for the guy. Even if this "Orca" thing had worked perfectly it's doubtful it would have changed much. Republican voters' dislike of Romney just ran too deep.
- ams6110 14y ago
  unelectable whackjob Hard to say that, given how the so-called "electable" guy did. My objection always was, the republicans nominated the guy who could not beat the last guy who could not beat Obama (i.e. McCain).
  - flxmglrb 14y ago
    Santorum is "unelectable" in the same way as Sarah Palin. Since they are so extreme, there will always be a small, dedicated swath of people who like them, and they can even get enough local support to get elected to an office, however once they hit the national stage they're toast. Also, I completely agree it is ludicrous how the Republicans chose to nominate someone less popular than McCain and are now acting surprised that he got fewer votes. Gee, no one could have predicted that!
tokenadult 14y ago
From an Ask HN post a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583307 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583307 > > Fairly often we see stories that link to a piece of useless blogspam rather than the original article. The guidelines say that these should never have been submitted. But are silent on what we should do if we notice the guideline being violated. > > Is it helpful for us to flag those as we notice them so that editors can more easily find and kill them? Or would those flags just an annoyance for editors, and we should just ignore them in the belief that they will get deleted if they are a problem? > Yes, flag them. The story kindly submitted here was nothing but one blogger quoting some earlier publications, with no new added analysis. There have been better submissions to HN on the same underlying story today, from better sources. This is one of the hot stories today.
gfodor 14y ago
An interesting takeaway from this article, if one believes this may have helped lead to a Obama victory, is Romney's campaign had a single point of failure: that poor little web server. One of the classic blunders!

142 points by CrankyBear 14y ago

This is pretty usual when government and software development are mixed together. All of the bad developers I met at college are now working for the government or are contracted by the government. Most hackers I know wouldn't go anywhere close to such a contract. My guess as to why it happens this way is that they check your scores rather than your actual skills and anyone without a diploma is automatically disqualified. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture.

brudgers 14y ago
The government wasn't involved at all. The Republican Party (like the Democratic Party) is just a large dumb organization.
mbetter 14y ago
Since when is Mitt Romney's campaign part of the government? And even if we give you that leap, Obama's campaign was fantastic on this particular front.
rprasad 14y ago
* All of the bad developers I met at college are now working for the government or are contracted by the government. * Interestingly, all of the government developers I know would run circles around almost any startup programmer. These guys design and implement systems that are designed to last decades without even minor bugs. Frequently, they manage to keep systems designed decades ago from collapsing under their own weight. My guess as to why it happens this way is that they check your scores rather than your actual skills and anyone without a diploma is automatically disqualified. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture. Government hiring is credentials and experience based. Don't be bitter that you can't get a job because you lack the credentials or experience to make the cut. Most hackers I know wouldn't go anywhere close to such a contract. A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone. When you are designing and implementing critical systems, being a professional matters. Most hackers simply don't have the self-discipline to get such a contract.
- qq66 14y ago
  "A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone." Let's see... you can wear shorts, work from home, and move fast and break things, or you can wear a tie to go to an office park and build DMV software. I'm not surprised that the people with a lot of options choose the startups.
  - rprasad 14y ago
    Well, I suppose the difference between the two is that in the former, you do nothing of relevance for a product that doesn't matter (which is why it can break repeatedly without incident). In the latter, you are building a program/system that people are actually using to do things. DMV software may not be sexy, but it is infinitely more valuable than yet another Instragram clone.
- pnathan 14y ago
  > A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone. When you are designing and implementing critical systems, being a professional matters. Most hackers simply don't have the self-discipline to get such a contract. Disagree. I work in critical system infrastructure. Dressing up nice to talk the computer doesn't make the code better; aggressively making the code better does. It's my opinion that the better dressed the guy writing code, the more suspect his code is...
  - michaelt 14y ago
    It's my opinion that the better dressed the guy writing code, the more suspect his code is... So do you think others make judgements about your ability to do a job based on how you're dressed?
    - pnathan 14y ago
      Everyone is making judgements, are you wearing black, are you wearing a suit, are you wearing fashionable clothing, etc. My opinion/observation is that the more attention that is paid to your clothing, the more your engineering/code quality suffers. It like the IQ test: wearing suits impresses people who think highly of people wearing suits. Maybe it's better to impress people who think highly of quality work. edit: It's foolishness to dress finely to make people think you're awesome. You're not more of a professional because you wear a tie and suit. You're just a guy in funny-looking clothing who looks like important people. If you want to be professional, do the job well, do it kindly, do it so it can be used for its intended purpose for a long time, do it with respect for other people. Dressing nice has so very little to do with professionalism.
roguecoder 14y ago
It wasn't a problem the Obama campaign had. Nor that the current government websites had. This was a failure of management by someone who, it appears, was good at exploiting tax loopholes rather than being good at managing people doing something productive. I would argue that this is the result of mixing business people into software development. MBAs focus on ultimate results instead of iterative improvement, believe in secrecy over learning and generally don't understand the human factor of software development, much less the infrastructure involved in running it once it's written. After all, programmers are cost centers to be outsourced as quickly as possible. The only person who admits to being a technical manager for Romney on LinkedIn is an old-school web developer, not a government worker. He's been a consultant for a decade and a half. His company's website uses Flash, loads six different totally unminimized js files and displays gradient images for the background. He is exactly the person I would expect a somewhat-older business dude to hire, if that business dude knew nothing about web development and was uncomfortable with excessively-technical things. His resume looks impressive, he's older than nearly everyone else with web experience, he can probably speak CEO-jargon-ese and he isn't going to make them feel dumb.

nlh 14y ago

Stripping out the politics here, some good lessons for all of us: 1. Test your damn product before it goes live. 2. User feedback, user feedback, user feedback. Things like the confusion of the use of "app" (vs "website") and the lack of http->https routing scream of things that a developer would think are "obvious" but even the most basic user testing would reveal early on. 3. Stealth mode can be trouble. This may be a controversial opinion but I've learned to believe more and more that "Surprise! We're here!" approach does more harm than good. There are limited circumstances where this is not the case (situations where knowing the existence of a project can damage that project) but I emphasize limited.

wpietri 14y ago
Yes! Long experience has taught me that I can either look dumb in front of a small, friendly audience of early testers or a big audience of people with inflated launch-day expectations. Not looking dumb is not an option. It is a big fucking world, and it will never fit inside the 3 pounds of meat that people somehow expect me to think with. Especially when some of that meat is dedicated to things like the ego and false pride that tell me that my big launch will be magically perfect because I am so smart.
- lukasb 14y ago
  "Not looking dumb is not an option." I'm going to be quoting you forever, thanks.

jd 14y ago

Are we really to believe this is plausible? 1: Romney's big data app failed on election day which led to ineffective use of their volunteers. 2: Romney's campaign performed exactly as predicted by the likes of Nate Silver. Therefore: the failure of their big-data app was inconsequential. Otherwise we have to assume that the hundreds of polls were consistently biased in the direction of Obama and that the failure of the Orca big data app exactly compensates for this failure of the polls so that the outcome of the election is nonetheless exactly as predicted! Absolutely 100% ridiculous.

bcoates 14y ago
Nate Silver predicted a range of outcomes including closer losses and victories for Romney. Republican "Get Out The Vote" outperforming history was probably a necessary condition of that 10% shot at winning. Instead it looks like the Romney campaign dropped the ball on it. No conspiracy theory needed.
- sinnerswing 14y ago
  An inside look behind Romney's loss: Bill Clinton
- ajross 14y ago
  Well, it's probably better to say that the 10% included all known error estimations. Given the skew between final polls and actual results seen over history, Silver's model figured it was 1 in 10 that some "unknown" factor would pollute the numbers enough to produce a Romney victory. In this he was actually much more conservative than Sam Wang, who AFAICT looked only at the poll sampling error and arrived at a muc higher (e.g. 99%) chance of victory. And actually, I think you can make the case that Silver was too conservative. Looking at the results, the poll averages were well within sampling error in all battleground states. And sorting the states by margin, Romney would have had to pick up FL, OH, VA and CO to win. Obama won Colorado by 4.7% (not too far from the predicted ~3.5%, I believe), which is comparatively huge and absolutely not explainable by polling error (a Romney victory there looks like about three sigma to me). In hindsight, the known state of the election on Tuesday morning was never winnable for Romney. Wang was right (even though his averages came down on the wrong side in FL), Silver was too timid.

ck2 14y ago

Why does everyone blame/praise the data? It's the voters that made the difference. We are talking 1% of people changed by campaigning, everyone has already made up their minds. They spend a billion dollars on this nonsense and probably a million "man hours" annoying people door to door. Just imagine what kind of actual good that much money and effort could have done for schools, etc. The population is just becoming more progressive and "values" from the 1950s are less and less popular.

tedh 14y ago
I'm a progressive but I don't know if I'm convinced that the populate is moving to the left. I hope so but.... Romney's loss may just be that he just wasn't a candidate that excited the right-wing enough for them to really get out and vote. Romney wasn't conservative enough for them and he made a number of bone-headed blunders along the campaign trail. That said, I hope you're right and I'm wrong : )
- ck2 14y ago
  The right would have voted for a lump of coal vs Obama after foaming at the mouth for the past four years at Obama. Romney is kind of proof of that since he was the pick of the primaries. It's not a get out the vote problem, it's just that the old population is slowly dying off and they can only brainwash their young to a certain level when information flows so freely today. I am disappointed there is only a 2.5% difference in the popular vote when Bush was only 4 years ago but people have tiny memories and change happens slowly. Values like anti-gay, anti-birthcontrol, etc. etc. etc. aren't going to fly with most voters under 25 unless they are raised in a very conservative environment and are never exposed to the rest of the world outside their home.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    the old population is slowly dying off As if the young population won't age and replace them? Believe me, age, responsibility, and having kids changes your outlook. When I was 25 and didn't know anything, I was pretty liberal too. I voted for Jesse Jackson once. And I supported Romney this year, even though he wasn't conservative enough for me, he was better than the alternative.

adolph 14y ago

It is pretty interesting that they didn't have the system up and running well before early voting started--do campaigns not do get out the vote volunteer work during early voting?

spamizbad 14y ago
My hunch is that this project was started way too late. At the start of the Republican primary in 2011, Romney's fundraising wasn't aggressive, and it's unlikely his team prioritized a "Big Data" initiative from day 1. In the ensuing primary slugfest, Romney probably needed to put a ton of resources into advertising to win. He also had a very large campaign payroll: his people were well compensated, but that didn't leave a lot money left-over for things like Orca. Based on this conjecture, Orca probably got started sometime in the Spring, essentially giving the campaign 5-7 months to ship a bullet-proof GotV app.... alongside all the other stuff the team had to build (Tons of miscellaneous internal tools, the public mobile apps, etc). A lack of time and resources probably doomed it. Moral of the story? Software is hard. Don't take it lightly.
- btilly 14y ago
  Lack of resources was probably not a problem. The amount of soft money around was tremendous. But too much resources leads to the temptation to throw lots of bodies at it. Lots and lots of bodies is simply not a good way to hit an aggressive schedule.
  - ZachPruckowski 14y ago
    But most of that money couldn't be put towards a program like ORCA. The one saving grace of Citizen's United is the limitation on PAC-campaign coordination.
    - microtherion 14y ago
      Romney could have lent the money to his own campaign, couldn’t he?

woodchuck64 14y ago

"Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election." I hope this puts the last nail in the coffin holding the remains of the hope that Romney would have been a better business and technical strategist for America than Obama.

viscanti 14y ago
Because no good business/technical strategist has ever overseen a complex software project that had a bug in it?
- s_henry_paulson 14y ago
  The article doesn't really describe a "bug" so much as a complete lack of planning, ignoring warning signs, brushing off questions and constructive criticisms, and in general demonstrates the exact wrong way to implement any system. No, no good strategist would ever release a "big data" system without stress testing it. You'd be hard pressed to find a job doing stuff like that.
- roguecoder 14y ago
  That was an unmitigated disaster, possibly contributing to the total destruction of their employer? Well, I don't label people based on single data points; they might be very nice people and perfectly competent. But I certainly wouldn't hire them after this.
marze 14y ago
The presidential election is a game, quite complicated, and the winner gets to be president. Voters and voting is just one aspect of the game. Romney lost this match, probably partly due to an IT and analysis advantage the Obama team had.
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ams6110 14y ago
Romney himself has a considerable track record of success in the private sector. Hard to think he would know less about what works than Obama, who has never worked there.

programminggeek 14y ago

I'm skeptical of blaming the tools so much as the people responsible for buying them, building them, etc. Also, no amount of data driven malarky changed the fact that a lot of people weren't so excited about Romney or so upset about Obama that they changed the current status quo. President, house, and senate remain largely the same, so really, people weren't convinced that a dramatically different direction was needed. At the end of the day, Romney lost because he didn't convince enough people to change. Some of that is money, some is tech, some is just he didn't do a good enough job leading his campaign to victory.

wpietri 14y ago
I agree about blaming the tools, but I think that last bit is false inference. An awful lot of people were convinced that a dramatically different direction was needed. It's just that we have roughly similar numbers of those people.

Tsts 14y ago

Romney never played the game to win, but to show there are even worse alternatives than the black Bush.

jfc 14y ago
What a vulgar sentiment! President Obama is hardly a black Bush, whatever your thoughts about his policies. If you really believe they are the same--yet utterly fail to articulate your rationale--there probably isn't much reason to engage in a discussion with you.
pradocchia 14y ago
Disagree w/ your specifics, strongly agree w/ the perception of a narrative being present. Agree that Romney was never in real danger of winning, disagree that he himself threw the contest. He wanted to win, it just wasn't in the cards.

GabrielF00 14y ago

FWIW the same thing happened to Obama in 2008, at least in the key swing state of Virginia. I did some campaigning there for Obama the weekend before the election and the system that managed their get-out-the-vote efforts had crashed statewide. The precinct captains were handing volunteers old printouts of where to knock on doors and then using a highlighter to mark your route on a Google Maps printout. Given the limitations it was still an effective system for organizing a lot of volunteers.

tedsuo 14y ago
Yeah, strike lists are The Way It Has Been Done for over a century, it works pretty well. What amazes me about this story is not that the software crashed, but that they did not have precinct captains and strike lists at the ready to step in. And that they were only rolling out their GOTV operation on the day of the election, and not sooner? Pretty bizarre.

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jfc 14y ago

I don't believe the app is the reason for the loss. It does, however, point to a glaring weakness of the campaign: organization.

patrickgzill 14y ago

The RNC establishment absolutely HATES Ron Paul's guts. Given the slap in the face to all the RP volunteers, a large percentage of them voted for the Libertarian candidate in protest, voted for Obama as a protest, or did not even vote. If you look at Ohio, Florida, and Virginia (I am going from memory here) - the votes gotten by the libertarian candidate represented a large portion of votes needed to swing the state to Romney. And those 3 states' EC votes would have put Romney a lot closer, giving him 266 EC votes. Add in Colorado (numbers below) and he would have won. Florida: 29EC votes; difference was 61,000 votes, L. got 44,000 votes Ohio: 18E votes: difference was 104,000 votes, L got 47,000 Virginia: 13EC votes: difference was 116,000, L and Constitution parties got 44,000 . Colorado: 9EC votes: difference was 113,000, L and Constitution got 37,000 . Clausewitz, in his treatise "On War" dedicates an entire chapter to "Moral Forces" , what we would term "an organization's morale" . Did crappy software contribute? Perhaps. But wars and elections are not won by software, but by people. That critical Libertarian slice or whatever you want to call it, of the traditional Republican base, was demoralized over Ron Paul and that resulted in an Obama victory. Description of rule changes at RNC convention: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/28/news/la-pn-ron-paul-supporters-walk-out-of-gop-convention-20120828 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/28/news/la-pn-ron-paul-...

dripton 14y ago
Regardless, there's no way all of those Libertarian voters would have voted Republican. Some who voted Libertarian did so out of concern for civil liberties or drug legalization or avoiding war, and many of those would be more likely to vote Democratic than Republican if the option of voting Libertarian were not present. You can't just put voters on a left-right axis.
qq66 14y ago
So even making the incorrect assumption that 100% of the Gary Johnson votes were coming from would-be Republicans, none of the outcomes would have changed.
- patrickgzill 14y ago
  That is not what I said... key sentence is "That critical Libertarian slice or whatever you want to call it, of the traditional Republican base, was demoralized over Ron Paul and that resulted in an Obama victory." Meaning the libertarian section of the Republican base, not meaning the people who necessarily voted for Gary Johnson.

danso 14y ago

The OP borders on blogspam, read the more detailed account where it was original posted: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php Among the more amusing errors: A checklist for poll-watchers left out a vital item -- "poll watcher certificate" -- in a packet that went out to tens of thousands of volunteers. This should also be amusing to most web devs: > Next, and this part I find mind-boggingly absurd, the web address was located at "https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca. Notice the "s" after http. This denotes it's a secure connection, something that's used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn't auto-forward the regular "http" to "https" and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down.

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gojomo 14y ago

There are more 1st-person details at the Breitbart account: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-the-Romney-Campaign-Suppressed-Its-Own-Vote http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-... I find this volunteer account notable: I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red. Putting aside Hanlon's Razor ("never ascribe to malics what can be explained by incompetence") for a moment: what if some of these failures were due to partisan/hacker tampering? If you owned the server(s), you could scramble a state's PINs. You could break redirects. You could bias the projections for overconfidence, or mark records as 'voted' or 'followed-up' that hadn't been. With a little phone-hacking, you could make sure attempts to call-in with problems get no answers. A single skilled amoral hacker could more easily suppress thousands of actual votes this way, compared to voting-machine/voting-tabulation tampering. And the details could disappear more easily into the secrecy and cover-your-ass bullshitting that is common in a partisan, temporary campaign organization.

evandena 14y ago

That wasn't much of a look inside.

flxmglrb 14y ago

Romney lost because he was a terrible candidate, simple as that. Even the Republican base hated him. Right now the GOP leadership is busy flailing around trying to figure out why they didn't win. The ones who have gotten closest to the truth are the ones who have zeroed in on this year's lower-than-normal turnout of traditionally Republican voters (as this article touches upon). However, the underlying reason for that wasn't a failure of software or a lack of last-minute "get out the vote" campaigning, it's because people just plain didn't like Romney. Remember the primaries? For months the Republican primaries were a game of "anybody but Romney". The primary voters at times even gave consideration to total crackpots like Santorum and Cain. Think about it -- they sent the message that they'd rather have some unelectable whackjob like Rick Santorum than be stuck with Romney. That's how much they didn't like him. But when it was all said and done, the Republicans finally gritted their teeth and accepted Romney as the nominee, despite the fact that they really, really didn't like the idea. Then on election day, many Republicans simply stayed home rather than hold their nose and vote for the guy. Even if this "Orca" thing had worked perfectly it's doubtful it would have changed much. Republican voters' dislike of Romney just ran too deep.

ams6110 14y ago
unelectable whackjob Hard to say that, given how the so-called "electable" guy did. My objection always was, the republicans nominated the guy who could not beat the last guy who could not beat Obama (i.e. McCain).
- flxmglrb 14y ago
  Santorum is "unelectable" in the same way as Sarah Palin. Since they are so extreme, there will always be a small, dedicated swath of people who like them, and they can even get enough local support to get elected to an office, however once they hit the national stage they're toast. Also, I completely agree it is ludicrous how the Republicans chose to nominate someone less popular than McCain and are now acting surprised that he got fewer votes. Gee, no one could have predicted that!

tokenadult 14y ago

From an Ask HN post a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583307 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583307 > > Fairly often we see stories that link to a piece of useless blogspam rather than the original article. The guidelines say that these should never have been submitted. But are silent on what we should do if we notice the guideline being violated. > > Is it helpful for us to flag those as we notice them so that editors can more easily find and kill them? Or would those flags just an annoyance for editors, and we should just ignore them in the belief that they will get deleted if they are a problem? > Yes, flag them. The story kindly submitted here was nothing but one blogger quoting some earlier publications, with no new added analysis. There have been better submissions to HN on the same underlying story today, from better sources. This is one of the hot stories today.

gfodor 14y ago

An interesting takeaway from this article, if one believes this may have helped lead to a Obama victory, is Romney's campaign had a single point of failure: that poor little web server. One of the classic blunders!