ORCA was a mobile-optimized web application used as a component of the "get out the vote" (GOTV) efforts for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. It was intended to enable volunteers in polling stations around the country to report which voters had turned out, so that "missing" Republican voters and underperforming precincts could be targeted for last-minute efforts to get voters to the polls. According to Romney himself, it would provide an "unprecedented advantage" to the campaign to "ensure that every last supporter makes it to the polls."
The system had major technical problems during Election Day that prevented many volunteers from using it. It crashed periodically and at one point was intentionally taken down when a surge of traffic from campaign volunteers was misinterpreted as a denial of service attack. Frustrated volunteers reported being unable to access ORCA and criticised a lack of prior briefing, misleading instructions and patchy on-the-day support. A Romney aide commented that "Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it." The system's failings have been attributed by technology writers to a combination of factors including not doing prior quality assurance or beta testing, inadequate documentation and poor design.
The Romney campaign subsequently defended ORCA as a success, though campaign officials admitted that the system "had its challenges". Conservative activists and writers blamed ORCA for depressing Republican turnout on election day. While political scientists have rebutted these claims, suggesting that it probably did not have a decisive effect on the outcome, it may have negatively affected turnout figures. ORCA has been compared unfavorably with a "get out the vote" and data effort from President Obama, including Project Narwhal, seen as more robust.
Intended purpose
In the 2008 US presidential election, the Obama campaign utilized a system called Houdini to enable volunteers to report voting data to a national hotline. While this system encountered problems, the 2012 Romney campaign's ORCA system aimed to go further by enabling volunteers to report such data to campaign headquarters in real time via their smartphones. It was intended to be rolled out to around 37,000 volunteers at polling places in swing states.
Gail Gitcho, the Romney campaign's communications director, told PBS on November 5 that with the deployment of ORCA on election day, the campaign would be able to tell who had voted in which precincts. She described the system's key function as not being to predict the outcome, but to identify low turnouts in target precincts so that the campaign could take action by contacting missing voters and urging them to go to the polls. Gitcho commented: "The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation, but it's nothing compared to this." The name ORCA was chosen to reference the Obama GOTV system, called Project Narwhal; in nature, the orca or killer whale is the only known non-human predator of narwhals.
In a training call for Republican volunteers on October 31, they were told: "There's nothing that the Obama data team, there's nothing that the Obama campaign, there's nothing that President Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here." According to reports, "The governor [Romney] loves seeing data, he loves seeing numbers and he's a very strategic person; he's a very smart man. So he actually loves being inside these war rooms, seeing the data come in and seeing exactly what's going on out there, so we can all put our heads together and say, 'Okay, we need to move resources here. We need to shift resources from here.'" The campaign's spokeswoman Andrea Saul told the Huffington Post that ORCA would provide Romney with "an enormous advantage ... By knowing the current results of a state, we can continue to adjust and micro target our get-out-the-vote efforts to ensure a Romney victory."
According to the campaign, ORCA would identify how between 18 and 23 million people had voted on election day, providing "the most accurate ballot projections ever" and ensuring "hyper-accuracy of our supporter targeting as we work to turn them out to the polls." In a pre-election video, Romney told volunteers: "As part of this task force, you'll be the key link in providing critical, real-time information to me and to the staff so that we can ensure that every last supporter makes it to the polls. With state-of-the-art technology, and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on Election Day."
The Obama campaign declined to comment on ORCA but Scott Goodstein, the external online director for the 2008 Obama campaign, questioned whether it would actually make much difference to potential voters who were sitting out the election. He commented, "In a national campaign, what additional things are the headquarters really going to do to move resources? Will an additional auto-call last minute really make a difference in a market like Northeast Ohio, which has been saturated for three months full of auto-calls?" Some pro-Democrat bloggers expressed concerns that the system would facilitate voter suppression but the ORCA training material emphasized that Romney volunteers should under no circumstances talk to or confront voters.
Development The system was initially reported to have been developed by an application consulting firm and Microsoft, but later reports attributed its development to "an internal 'skunkworks'" comprising "a makeshift team of IT people and volunteers", rather than an outside consultancy, while a number of small consulting companies helped with the implementation of ORCA during election day. According to campaign insiders, it was kept secret among "a close circle in Boston" and state officials were not informed of how it would operate until only a few days before the election. Volunteer users of ORCA in Boston were given no hands-on training until the day of the election itself, when the system was turned on at 6 am.
ORCA was conceived by Rich Beeson, the campaign's political director, and Dan Centinello, Romney's director of voter contact. Centinello served as the political manager of the Orca project.
ORCA spending represented only a small portion of the campaign's overall investment in information technology.
Features and functionality ORCA was designed to work on a variety of devices, including iPhones and iPads, Android phones and tablets and BlackBerry phones.
The system was designed to show the names and addresses of every eligible voter in a particular precinct. When the voter had gone through the polling station, a logged-in volunteer would simply slide a bar on their phone screen to note that fact. If there were any problems in the polling station, such as erroneous voting lists, illegal activities or issues with the voting machines, they could press an on-screen yellow button to send an alert to the campaign's lawyers. A Twitter-style instant messenger system would also enable volunteers and the campaign to share information in real time. Those without smartphones were also catered for; the Romney campaign would provide a list of voters to enable volunteers to check off individual names and phone the information into the campaign's headquarters. The data they gathered would be monitored by 800 volunteers at campaign headquarters on the floor of TD Garden in Boston via a Web-based application; it would be used to coordinate contacts throughout election day to pro-Romney voters who had not shown up at the polls. As a fallback, a voice response system would also be established, to allow mobile phone users to call in information if the online system was not working. The voice response system was brought in the night before the election, setup on the floor of TD Garden, and went live on election day.
ORCA consisted of 11 back-end database servers and a single web server and application server providing the front end. The servers were said to have all been hosted in Boston.
Usage Throughout election day, volunteers experienced frequent and widespread problems using ORCA, which crashed periodically. As volunteers tried to log in, the surge of traffic caused the system to collapse altogether for about an hour and a half, leading to scenes of panic among Romney staffers at the TD Garden. The Romney campaign's digital director, Zac Moffatt, conceded: "The Garden definitely kind of buckled under the strain. The system wasn't ready for the amount of information incoming." The traffic surge was so great that at one point Comcast, the campaign's Internet Service Provider, shut off its network connection in the belief that it was coming under a denial of service attack. Reporter Erin McPike tweeted that some suspected that the system had been hacked and that Republican sources had confirmed to her that something had gone wrong. One Romney aide commented that "ORCA is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it."
John Ekdahl Jr., a Romney volunteer and web developer in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote a widely discussed account of his experiences with ORCA. The Romney campaign had sent him a 60-page document listing voters and instructions the day before the election, which he struggled to print, but when he reached his local polling station on election day he was told that he needed a certificate to be allowed to work there. The certification was not mentioned in his documentation and his attempts to reach campaign headquarters got nowhere, causing him to give up by 2 pm. Calling ORCA "an unmitigated disaster," Ekdahl said that he was "hearing almost universal condemnation of the thing. It seemed like the basic coordination between ground ops and overall team was lacking." Ekdahl also called the training manuals vague and uninformative; ORCA was regularly described as an "app", leading to volunteers looking unsuccessfully for it on the iOS App Store and Google Play. In fact, it was a web application, a mobile-enabled website that did not require additional software to use. The training materials were also riddled with errors such as duplicate checklist items and erroneous responses to frequently asked questions. ORCA exclusively used an HTTP Secure (HTTPS) connection but its designers had apparently forgotten to redirect those attempting to use the equivalent HTTP address to the HTTPS address. Anyone who incorrectly typed in an address beginning with "www" was unable to reach the system, causing many volunteers to assume that it was down.
Other volunteers reported being unable to get through to technical support and found themselves receiving either a busy signal or a "try again later" message. One volunteer wrote on a Romney campaign message board: "I have called the ORCA helpline. It was supposed to be live at 5 a.m. ... still getting a recording. Com [sic] on Boston we can't help Mitt if you won't help us.!!!!!" Many volunteers could not get their security PINs to work. According to a campaign official in Colorado, "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. Then at 6 p.m. they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINS (which also didn't work)." In North Carolina, another campaign official said that "the system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day... Many members of our phone bank got up and left." One frustrated volunteer tweeted that it was "a clusterf**k of biblical proportions."
Impact and post-mortems