Which consultants built Romney's "Project Orca?" None of them | Hacker News Reader

Which consultants built Romney's "Project Orca?" None of them

arstechnica.com

33 pointsiProject15 comments

Dancentinello.com is why everyone should try to own the .com domain for their name, if only to maintain control over your online presence.

wow! so now Romney's loss is all because of this one guy, and if he'd done his job they'd have won?

Of course not. The app doesn't really affect how people vote, it's just does some reporting and analytics.

Not true. This was supposed to be an automated strike list. You check off your voters as they come in to vote, and if they haven't, you give them a call (or even a personal visit) and say "hey, get your butt to the polls". Getting out your own vote seriously matters.

Whether this thing would have been enough to sway the election had it worked, I don't know, but it certainly didn't help the Romney campaign (and probably hurt some of the downticket races as well).

my system for doing exactly this worked perfectly in Dallas county. Not sure why they had so many problems

sorry, I thought the sarcasm was self evident. obviously it wasn't

In practice you also need to buy the .net and .org of any domain you really care about, because somebody will register the other two if any one of them becomes popular.

So, it turns out that Orca was a skunkworks project by volunteers. It fails, and the person behind it gets blamed for losing the election.

I think the lesson to be learned here is, "Never volunteer for anything."

I think the more telling issue is that Romney et al. would throw an intern under the bus over this. I mean there is no possible way that he lost on his own merit.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that the guy who wanted to be President entrusted his get out the vote effort to skunkworks volunteers on the cheap (-ish).

This is truly a great day and age for hackers. You can't become president these days without 'em.

Politech (technology used by politicos) seems like a big untapped market to me, though I really know nothing about it.

Elections spend a lot of cash, but governments spend more.

In the future, governments will be entirely run by automated systems. Many layers of bureaucracy will be consolidated in to machines that run themselves.

In other words, the consultants had their workers rebranded as unaffilated volunteers despite getting a pay day worthy of Ahab's undying devotion.

very interesting story--but more interesting is that this story is on the front page with only 3 points.

No it's not. Three points in under fifteen minutes on a late near weekend night is enough acceleration to make it to the front

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