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Comment by brianchu | Hacker News Reader

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

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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).

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.

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

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