The system was not shared with officials outside a small group in Boston. Romney's ORCA program sank

Mitt Romney’s campaign boasted for the past two weeks that it would outgun President Barack Obama’s team in the Democrats’ area of strength — voter-targeting. It would use a state-of-the-art system called ORCA, named for the killer whale, that cost substantial resources to build over months.

Instead, Romney campaign officials were mostly flying without instruments on Election Day.


Numerous Republicans in and around the Romney campaign called the ORCA platform a total bust, stranding thousands of volunteers without a way of reporting data back to headquarters and leaving Romney central command without a clear view of developments on the ground.

The system was not shared with officials outside a small group in Boston and was kept largely a secret until the immediate lead-up to Election Day. The system was beta-tested on its own but not within technical infrastructure of the Boston TD Garden, where the Romney campaign’s massive War Room was set up. That accounted for a number of the problems, officials conceded, even as they protested to POLITICO the depth of the Election Day meltdown.

Three sources described the campaign to POLITICO as “flying blind” on Tuesday in terms of targeting, with ORCA — which had a pricetag of hundreds of thousands of dollars — failing. There was another sizable allocation of funds for emergency robocalls to goose turnout late in the day in key areas identified by ORCA, but those were never put to widespread use.

Romney political director Rich Beeson defended ORCA as a first step toward a larger-scale voter turnout system that the GOP needs to develop, telling POLITICO that the data flow was imperfect but still significant.

“Did it work perfectly? No. But did we get a hell of a lot of good data? Yes,” Beeson said. “When I needed answers, I could get them.”

One of the problems, Beeson said, was that ORCA was never tested in the context of the TD Garden. When so much data started flowing into the facility, it was perceived to be a hack and rejected, Beeson said.

“In all the other testing we had, we didn’t have that issue,” Beeson said. “When you’re dealing with 34,000 people across the country, there’s going to be any number of issues, whether it’s user error or smart phone didn’t work. The system wasn’t perfect and we never claimed it would be. But as we go through cycles, this is the beginning of something that’s going to be very, very effective.”

In any case, Beeson said, the campaign had only a few months to assemble the turnout system: “You’re sort of building an airplane as you take off from the aircraft carrier.”

Romney digital director, Zac Moffatt — who did not oversee Project ORCA — conceded there were some problems but insisted the system generally worked.

“I’m not going to blow smoke,” he said. “I’m not saying there weren’t challenges.”

But he insisted that people were taking their own individual experiences and extrapolating that the entire system failed, when in fact it worked overall.

“A lot of data came into the system that we have on file now,” he said, although he couldn’t answer questions about whether it was continuous throughout the day or simply at the end. He insisted that 91 percent of all counties reported into the system, 14.3 million voters were accounted for as “voted,” and 5,397 reports of voting issues were reported, such as broken machines and a dearth of ballots.

“Look, we experienced challenges through it,” Moffatt said, but he insisted, “It allowed us to continue our GOTV efforts and allowed us at such a massive scale to track voting irregularities.”

Like where? “Florida, Ohio. We were seeing different things coming in through the alerts.”

Asked whether the numerous unidentified sources who said there was no data feed that was useful to Boston were wrong, he replied that it was hard to comment without knowing who was speaking. But he was adamant he saw data coming in throughout the day as he watched it “tangentially” on a Twitter feed-like system.

He did not immediately respond to a question about what firm was contracted to develop ORCA, which was overseen by deputy political director Dan Centinello, according to several sources involved in the operation.

One Republican source with close ties to the operation said the system essentially appeared to have crashed on the first wave of information coming in, and never managed to get started again. It was down throughout the day, and while it may have been gathering numbers, it never provided the output in terms of target guidance it was supposed to, said a source.

“The problem is not only that it doesn’t work on Election Day,” said the source. “The problem is, you divert an enormous amount of human and financial resources over many months to [building this]. So that means they’re not doing anything else for turnout.”

Several Romney backers stressed that, based on the outcome on Nov. 6, this system breakdown was not the reason they lost. But it was a striking meltdown of a project the campaign heralded as a key ingredient to success.

One Republican who helped operate the system from Boston on Election Day called it a near-complete “failure” and an “amateur operation.” Throughout the morning, volunteers in the states called frantically back to headquarters to alert campaign officials to ORCA’s deficiencies: Users’ login information and data entry failed and a backup phone system locked out many campaign workers and failed to confirm that information from others had been received. Cries for help from the campaign help desk went more or less unanswered.

“Pretty much every single person who called in would have one of six discrete errors [with ORCA], but each of them was enough to prevent them” from using the system, the Republican said.

After “hours and hours pass and there’s no resolution,” the Republican said the campaign help desk instructed them: “The numbers are coming in, things are fine, just project confidence.”

“At the end of the day, they told us that every single swing state was looking either pink or red and the worst one was Virginia, where they were a little concerned. Of course, we know the opposite of that happened,” the Republican said. “So what was the quality of that data throughout the day?”

In some cases, another Republican said, volunteers were just told to record information about voter turnout on paper and keep it handy until ORCA returned to full functionality. It didn’t.

Another Republican working on the system in Boston told POLITICO, “They kept telling us the problems on North Carolina were just our state, but that’s apparently not true … We discovered as the day went on that no one was using [the website] because someone had sent out incorrect logins and passwords to every single person in the state.”

“We had been told the night before that those would be populated with data and maps so that we could see what was going on during the day,” the worker said. “They remained blank the entire day. So we thought either there’s some problem with the data — they don’t have the data — or it’s bad.”

“At 5 p.m., they put on Fox News — or 6 p.m., sometime late in the day they put the TV on,” he added.

Even as campaign workers in Boston and throughout the states fumed over the lack of information coming in via ORCA, senior Romney campaign advisers kept projecting an air of self-assurance to supporters across the country. Reporters asking about myriad reports of outages were told that the system, which would periodically function but not long enough to be of much help, was up and running just fine — or their questions were ignored altogether.

On a midafternoon conference call with political insiders, Romney campaign brass ticked off a list of data points about turnout — in mega-swing states such as Colorado, Ohio and Florida — that they called signs that victory was at hand. They warned that people shouldn’t take the media consortium exit polling too seriously, since it would most likely be wrong.

It’s not clear where that data came from, given that much of the campaign’s GOTV-tracking machinery was dysfunctional. In retrospect, said several Republicans who participated in the call, at least some of the information was flat-out wrong. Other sources said the campaign was getting its raw vote tallies from places like CNN.com’s feed or from calling state officials to get specific county totals.

The issues with ORCA started trickling out over the past few days. Campaign workers who were in the field offices described in detail on blogs hours of frustration trying to make the defunct system work.

The collapse of the ORCA platform is all the more astonishing because of how aggressively the Romney campaign hyped it in advance of Nov. 6.

Centinello was quoted in The Huffington Post on Nov. 1 touting ORCA to volunteers in these grandiose terms: “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.”

But for operatives within the Romney orbit, there was reason for skepticism even before the system went down on Election Day. Strategists in the states never got a chance to test-drive ORCA, which would have left them unfamiliar with the software on Tuesday even if it had worked.

Some supporters were also dubious about the claims from Romneyland that ORCA was going to be a game-changer. It became clear, two sources said, a few weeks ago that they weren’t testing out ORCA on the early vote, which supporters couldn’t understand.

A memo to surrogates on the eve of the election stressed the same points.

It would be “the world’s largest exit poll. Through Project ORCA, at any given moment we will know the current ballot in every State, DMA & County… For example: if we happen to be down in a state at lunch time, we can pinpoint exactly what is causing. So, if we know we’re going to win X state by 3 points, let’s move our resources to Y state, county. In sum, Project ORCA will give us an enormous advantage by being able to know the current result of a state.”

There is a “brain” that was built into the system’s dashboard, which would “alert decision-makers to key findings and suggest reallocation of resources. Project ORCA will also allow us to filter out Romney supporters who have already voted from all of our GOTV lists. So all volunteers, whether physically at a phone bank or calling online will no longer be calling several supporters who have already cast a vote. Instead, we’ll see an unprecedented efficiency among volunteer turnout efforts where virtually no phone calls or time is wasted calling those who have already voted.”